The blue bird of the title was paid $50 a day, and flew away from a Los Angeles aviary soon after the movie was finished.
The production utilized 300 children between the ages of 4 and 10. Twentieth Century-Fox hired 30 nurses and 30 studio teachers to look after the children, all under the supervision of assistant director Henry Weinberger.
On 24 December 1939, a month before the film premiered, Shirley Temple and Nelson Eddy performed a 30-minute radio adaptation of the play on the Lady Esther Screen Guild Theater, a program adapting popular films with some of Hollywood's biggest stars. It was during this program, according to Ms. Temple's autobiography, that a deranged woman who'd been stalking her managed to get within three feet of the stage with a loaded gun before being stopped and disarmed. Ms. Temple, Mr. Eddy, and the rest of the cast somehow managed to keep their composure through all of this, with the listening audience none the wiser.
Gale Sondergaard was originally cast as the Wicked Witch in Il mago di Oz (1939), but she instead chose the role of Tylette the Cat in this film.
Shirley Temple's producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, decided to make this film after he mistakenly took the success of Il mago di Oz (1939) as a sign that children's fantasy films were popular. With World War II fast approaching, however, audiences had no interest in Temple's unsympathetic character.