The show was commissioned by Talent Associates at the request of producer Daniel Melnick, who wanted to capitalize on the popularity of James Bond and Inspector Clouseau, described as 'the two biggest things in the entertainment world today'.

Mel Brooks said he created the show because he was sick of sensible sitcoms like Hazel and wanted to do a 'crazy, unreal, comic-strip kind of thing' about an idiot, since no one had done a show about an idiot before.

Brooks and Henry originally pitched the show to ABC, but network executives rejected it, calling it 'un-American' and demanding a lovable dog and scenes with Maxwell Smart's mother, suggestions Brooks strongly opposed.

Agent Larabee was played by Robert Karvelas, who was actually Don Adams' real-life cousin.

Don Adams missed most of the episode 'Ice Station Siegfried' because he was performing in Las Vegas for two weeks to settle gambling debts.

In the third-season episode 'The Little Black Book,' guest star Don Rickles encouraged Don Adams to ad-lib despite dialogue rarely being improvised on the show; the result was so successful the episode was expanded into two parts.

The Cone of Silence gag was filmed ahead of the rest of the pilot episode 'Mr. Big' specifically so it could be used to sell the show to NBC.

Mel Brooks came up with the idea of Max's iconic shoe phone, one of over 50 objects in the show that concealed a hidden telephone, including a necktie, comb, watch, and clock.

The prop shoe phone was displayed in 2002 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in an exhibit on real and fictional spy gear, and Flinders University in Australia later researched medical applications inspired by the shoe phone technology.

The car Max drove most often, a red 1965 Sunbeam Tiger, was actually built using a Sunbeam Alpine body by customizer Gene Winfield because the Alpine's four-cylinder engine left more room under the hood for gadgets than the Tiger's V8.

Because Volkswagen became a sponsor in seasons three and four, Max's car in the opening credits changed to a light blue Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, though it never actually appeared in the episodes themselves; a similar sponsor swap later replaced the car with a gold Opel GT when Buick became a sponsor in season five.

A planned Get Smart movie tied to the 1960s TV-to-film trend (following Batman's success) was cancelled after another show's film, Munster Go Home, flopped at the box office; the script was instead reworked into the three-part TV episode 'A Man Called Smart.'

With the 1995 revival series on Fox, Get Smart became the first television franchise to air new episodes or TV films on each of the four major American networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox).