Bill Bixby (best known as David Banner in "The Incredible Hulk") guest starred and directed some of the later shows.
The producers never expected the show to get renewed so they wrote what they considered to be an unsolvable cliffhanger - Sledge accidentally blowing up L.A. with a nuclear bomb, leaving a devastated wasteland in the last shot of the episode. ABC decided to pick up the show for a second season, leaving them to come up with a witty way to continue on.
The first 13 episodes had canned laughter in their audio tracks. Starting with episode 14, "State of Sledge", ABC gave in to creator Alan Spencer's request to have the laugh track omitted from the series. The DVD release has all canned laughter deleted from the first 13 episodes.
During a motel raid scene in "Under the Gun" 1.1, two adjacent room numbers - "86" and "99" are used. These are references to Don Adams and Barbara Feldon's agent numbers in the series "Get Smart" (1964).
The episode 1.7 "All Shook Up", featured a sarcastic jab towards the series' lead-in at the time, "Mr. Belvedere" (1985), and caused a subsequent feud between the two shows. This bad blood carried over to "Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The" (1962), where "Mr. Belvedere" star Bob Uecker made a wisecrack about "Sledge Hammer" while guesting. This would lead Spencer to hurl an even more vicious insult at "Belvedere" in a later episode.
The producers were not allowed to use any Elvis recordings or songs during the episode 1.7 "All Shook Up" because the Presley estate was upset over the episode which they felt was disrespectful. Nonetheless, two songs identified with Elvis were still included: Hammer mumbles nonsense lyrics to the melody of "Love Me Tender" which was actually an old public domain folk song called "Aura Lee", and sings the ending of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which was also public domain.
The episode 2.6 "Vertical" was a parody and homage of "Vertigo", right down to a similar score and similarly directed shots.
The episode 2.9 "Last of the Red Hot Vampires" features a tribute message to "Mr. Blasko" at the end. Blasko was Bela Lugosi's real last name.
In the episode 2.10 "Hammeroid", the robotic suit is a parody of the film "Robocop".
In the episode 2.14 "Model Dearest", the character "Don Merrill" is named after TV critic Don Merrill, who couldn't stand the show and often called producer Alan Spencer and griped about how "Sledge Hammer!" was still on the air.
Heather Lupton (David Rasche's wife) guest starred in the last episode 2.19 "Here's to You, Mrs. Hammer".
