This first episode of the series was the original pilot film for the series, with a running time of 77 minutes. It was made as a black & white B-movie, and was released as a theatrical movie in some export countries by Warner Bros. such as Jamaica and The Bahamas. It was filmed in the fall of 1957 in Burbank, and features some local city landmarks, such as the Burbank City Hall, as well as a local movie theater showing then-new WB movie releases of Band of Angels (1957) and The Pajama Game (1957) with lots of stock locations footage of cities as always seen in B-movies of the 1950s.
Comb-crazy, cold-blooded hit-man Smiley is played by Edd Byrnes, whose performance was so popular with teenage girls that he was written into the series in a different part: hip car hop Kookie. This 77 minute pilot was released theatrically in the Caribbean to block Roy Huggins' financial claim of creating the series in a run of 40s noir novels. The pilot then became the first episode of this series. Consequently, Huggins became a producer on this show, then Maverick (1957) and The Rockford Files (1974) among others, and created the ironclad Huggins Contract. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. also appeared as Huggins' character Stuart Bailey in a prior series, Conflict (1956).
Although "77 Sunset Strip" was a popular Saturday night entertainment on TV in Britain for several years in the late 50s and early 60s, this story was never shown on TV there. However, it had a cinema release as a B-feature in the UK, its release starting on January 25th, 1959.
This first pilot episode had a running time of 77 minutes, just like the show is called 77 Sunset Strip,