According to a behind the scenes featurette, Community season 3 was over budget. This episode was conceived as a way to save money, as they could reuse all the props from the previous episode, and a lot of the episode would feature narration and stills, cutting down on shooting time and production costs.
At the end of the episode, Jeff asks the narrator "weren't you in The Cape?" Although the narrator says no, Keith David, who provides the narration for this episode, actually was a regular on The Cape (2011).
The structure, style, and music used in this episode are parodies of the documentary films of Ken Burns, especially his five-night epic The Civil War (1990). This reference is extended all the way to the PBS-style pledge drive plea for donations after the end credits.
The picture of "English Memorial" (the Portuguese sailor that discovered Greendale while looking for a fountain that cured syphilis) is actually a picture of the show's creator, Dan Harmon, made to look like a renaissance painting.
The campus map used in this episode is based on the map of Los Angeles City College, where the exterior scenes for Community (2009) are filmed.