Executive producers Harry Longstreet and Renee Longstreet had been saving money from the budget all season long so that they could afford all the returning castmembers they wanted to include in the series finale. They had set aside $160,000 in a special account for this purpose. But Lee Rich, the chairman and chief executive of MGM/UA Communications assumed the money was going into the Longstreet's own pockets and took it away from them. Forced to find a new way to retain enough money for the finale, the budget of the second to last episode was pared down to the bone. It was shot in five-and-a-half days and had lots of archive footage from previous seasons cut into it.