Clark Gable gave the Oscar he won for his performance in this movie to a child who admired it, telling him it was the winning of the statue that had mattered, not owning it. The child returned the Oscar to the Gable family after Clark's death.
Columbia did not have much faith in the film and released it without much fanfare and little advertising. It was quickly pushed out to secondary theaters where it suddenly became a runaway success, and eventually became Columbia's biggest hit to date.
Sucedió una noche (1934) became the first film to perform a "clean sweep" of the top five Academy Award categories, known as the Oscar "grand slam": Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. This feat would later be duplicated by Atrapado sin salida (1975) in 1976 and El silencio de los inocentes (1991) in 1992. However, It Happened One Night is the only one not nominated in any other category.
Friz Freleng's unpublished memoirs mention that this was one of his favorite films, and that it contains at least three things which the character "Bugs Bunny" was based on: the character Oscar Shapely's (Roscoe Karns) personality, the manner in which Peter Warne (Clark Gable) was eating carrots and talking quickly at the same time, and an imaginary character mentioned once to frighten Oscar Shapely named "Bugs Dooley." Other mentions of "Looney Tunes" characters from the film include Alexander Andrews (Walter Connolly) and King Westley (Jameson Thomas) being the inspirations for Yosemite Sam and Pepé Le Pew, respectively.
While shooting the scene where he undresses, Clark Gable had trouble removing his undershirt while keeping his humorous flow going and took too long. As a result, the undershirt was abandoned altogether. An urban legend follows that it then became cool to not wear an undershirt, which supposedly resulted in a large drop in undershirt sales around the country. Legend also has it that in response, some underwear manufacturers tried to sue Columbia.
Frank Capra: as one of the passengers on the bus singing the third couplet of "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze".