The princess Bosana's 2.5-metre long artificial nose animated by Jan Svankmajer eventually ended up in a museum of movie curiosities in USA.
The three elves who hand the heroes the magic items were to be styled as the Marx Brothers. One of them (Milos Kopecký) actually resembles Groucho Marx and another (Jirí Kaftan) Harpo Marx. Only the gnome played by the director's brother Lubomír Lipský looks more like a circus clown. He already played a circus clown in two of his brother's earlier films, Ça c'est du cirque! (1954) and Une journée au cirque (1972).
Screenwriter Zdenek Sverák (who also played the minister) didn't like the ending of the film, because as the princess's long nose moved back to the kingdom, there were many shots of German cities. So he asked the director Oldrich Lipský to shorten the sequence and cut some of those parts out, because it was getting boring. Lipský replied that he couldn't, because he had asked for an increase in the budget, since he was going to shoot in East Germany and he had to show the Barrandov Studio Commission as much footage from Germany as possible. In East Germany, a version three minutes longer (96 min) was released in 1985, and it contained all the footage Lipský had shot in Germany. Oddly, when the film was released on DVD in Germany in 2004, it was heavily edited down to 88 minutes, with scenes such as German soldiers with rifles at the ready following the princess's nose to their border or a complete scene of Zdenek Sverák talking on the phone to the Germans cut out.
Jirí Brdecka was originally hired as screenwriter, but he passed away before he started to work on it.