This episode won the Mass Media Award from The National Conference of Christians and Jews.
A picture of several horse heads that is seen on the wall of the Ruxton house
was a longtime prop that hung in Doc's office as far back as the 1950's.
Richard Dreyfuss would become a major star later that year when American Graffiti (1973) was widely released on August 11, 1973, and he would of course reach superstardom playing Hooper in Jaws (1975) two years later. There was never a character named "Hooper" on "Gunsmoke"; however, there was a "Brody" family in an episode from the preceding season, Trail of Bloodshed (1974) featuring Dreyfuss's Poseidon (2006) co-star Kurt Russell, and of course from 1962 to 1965 during the show's long run, another star that Dreyfuss has worked with, Burt Reynolds, played a regular character named "Quint." Murray Hamilton, who played Mayor Vaughn in "Jaws" and worked with Reynolds in the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) titled Escape to Sonoita (1960) and in an episode of Reynolds's own series Hawk (1966), had appeared in three episodes of "Gunsmoke" in the late fifties.