Actor Henry Winkler sports peroxided blond hair in this movie. The name of the blond-haired ballet-costume-wearing wrestling character with a harem of girls that Andy Schmidt (Henry Winkler) creates is "The Lover" or "The Great Lover', and he is "The One And Only" of the film's title. The character and film's story was based on glamour wrestler Gorgeous George (real name George Raymond Wagner) and his career. This picture was made and released about 15 years after Gorgeous George had passed away. Winkler once commented that George had blond curls and sprayed himself in the ring with perfume: "If that doesn't shatter my Fonz image, nothing will!"
Actor Henry Winkler first became aware of the script for this movie when he ran into actor Dustin Hoffman in a doorway of a New York building. Hoffman talked for about three minutes about some screenplays he owned the rights to and about a year later Winkler received a copy of this film's script.
At one point, the entire family is watching Your Show of Shows (1950) starring Sid Caesar, the TV program on which director Carl Reiner first made his mark.
Producer David V. Picker said that Gorgeous George's biography was fictionalized for the film because the production was unable to obtain the rights to his biography.
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