Brancaleone at the Crusades

Gigi Proietti voiced Death and also physically played the character himself in the film, wearing a mask that made him completely unrecognizable, as confirmed by both director Mario Monicelli and Proietti himself in a DVD interview.

Proietti recalled sweating profusely under his Death mask while filming in the desert, joking that since no one could recognize him anyway, there was little point in enduring the heat.

Catherine Spaak, Gian Maria Volontè and Enrico Maria Salerno, who had starred in the first film L'armata Brancaleone, did not return for the sequel both because they were committed to other projects and because director Monicelli wanted to create a certain discontinuity with the previous film.

The role of the monk Zenone, previously played by Enrico Maria Salerno, was given instead to Shel Shapiro, singer of the band The Rokes.

The film was shot partly in Algeria, for the scenes set in the Holy Land and the desert, and partly in Italy at locations including the ruins of Ostia Antica, the village of Piglio near Frosinone, the Civita di Bagnoregio badlands, the Banditaccia necropolis in Cerveteri, the shores of Lake Vico, and the ruins of Antica Monterano.

Some interpretations, not confirmed by the director, see the scenes with Death as a parody of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returning from the Holy Land plays chess with Death to delay his demise; Monicelli stated in a DVD interview that he did not intend this as an explicit reference, noting that personifications of Death had long appeared in other films.

The character of the stylite hermit Colombino, also played by Gigi Proietti, is a reference to Luis Buñuel's film Simon of the Desert.

As with the previous film, the animated opening and closing titles, as well as the animations introducing individual episodes, were created by Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini.

Upon release, the film was a great success with critics and audiences, though it did not match the box office earnings of the first film.