Clayton Farlow mentions he is taking Miss Ellie to see the stage musical Camelot as there is an actor with quite a good voice playing the role of King Arthur. Howard Keel, who played Clayton, had starred as Arthur in numerous stage productions of Camelot as well as in many other musicals on stage and screen.
The title is a play on "The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong," a 1969 bestselling business book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. The book observed that "every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
Lee Montgomery, who played Peter's erstwhile roommate Jerry Hunter, later starred in the movie Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), which film also featured Morgan Woodward, who plays Punk Anderson.