Judge Reinhold attributed this film, which was a box office flop, as being the decline of his career. Combined with a reputation for being difficult to work with, Reinhold said "That's when the phone stopped ringing." He moved out of Los Angeles to a small town near Santa Fe, New Mexico to regroup his life.
Part of a late 1980s mini-cycle of age-swap / body-swap pictures. The movies included Big (1988), 18 Again! (1988), Vice Versa (1988), De l'autre côté du rêve (1989), and Mon père c'est moi (1987).
The movie was made and released around 106 years after it source novel "Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers" by Thomas Anstey Guthrie had been first published in 1882.
The digital guitar featured in the "music room" scene where Charlie (as Marshall) jams with a random customer and store employee was a real device -- the Stepp DG-1 Guitar Synthesizer. It did cost $7000 when released, as stated in the film. However, the audio heard in the movie is from a live electric guitar, as the DG-1 could not convincingly imitate one well enough to be believable at the time.
The picture's director Brian Gilbert said of this movie: "The comedy of the film comes from the comedy of inappropriateness. It's the humor of things being in their wrong places, of justifiable and decent attitudes in the wrong context, the whole sense of perspectives turned upside down. Judge [Reinhold] and Fred [Savage] have had to think things through with quite a degree of logic and also intuition. It's been very demanding to make it real and to make it organic".