During the scene from the hotel bar, the bellboy is paging "Mr. Lee Weaver." In real life, Lee Weaver (II) is an actor who has worked with Bill Cosby on all of his television shows. He is most memorable as Chet Kincaid's brother on The Bill Cosby Show (1969) and as Ray Nay on A Different World (1987).
Series star Robert Culp wrote this episode, the first broadcast. This was one of the first occasions in US TV history in which the introductory episode of a dramatic TV series had been written by one of its stars.
According to his commentary on the 2002 DVD release, Robert Culp wrote several scripts for the series on his own initiative after being dissatisfied with the script for the show's pilot episode. Culp had already written episodes for several other TV series by this time.
The city mentioned during the press conference, Ouagadougou, is in Burkina Faso. At the time of the episode, the country was known as the Republic of Upper Volta.