Winsor McCay receives no onscreen credit for creating the characters and elements upon which the film is based.
The "walking bed" sequence pays homage to one of the most iconic images from Winsor McCay's comic strip.
Based on the Sunday comic strip series "Little Nemo in Slumberland" by Winsor McCay, which ran from October 15, 1905 to January 9, 1927. In January 2020, it was announced that a new live-action film adaptation will be made exclusively for Netflix, directed by Francis Lawrence and featuring a gender-swapped version of the title character Nemo. Jason Momoa stars as a radically altered version of Flip who is described as a "nine-foot tall creature that is half-man, half-beast, has shaggy fur and long curved tusks", while the plot focusing on Nemo and Flip traveling across Slumberland in search of Nemo's father.
Flip's line "sometimes a pig is just a pig," is a reference to Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's famous statement "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Flip mentions Freud in the next scene.
In Winsor McCay's comics, Flip is short and fat with a green face and a cigar with the overall appearance of a circus clown.