The first recorded use of the term "gold digger" to refer to a woman who pursues and uses men for their money dates back to about 1915.

Warner Bros. made several follow-ups to this picture, not truly sequels because, although they featured many of the same actors, the characters and situations were different. Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) starred Dick Powell; Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936) featured Powell and Joan Blondell; none of the original cast were featured in Gold Diggers in Paris (1938), which starred Rudy Vallee and Rosemary Lane.

In the film Off the Record (1939), Joan Blondell introduces Pat O'Brien to a hobo she calls "my forgotten man."

A Porky Pig cartoon from 1935 was titled Gold Diggers of '49.

In the Warner Bros. cartoon Ali Baba Bunny (1957), Daffy Duck discovers a treasure to the instrumental accompaniment of "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're In the Money)." The tune has been used many times as an indication of sudden good fortune in various movies and TV shows, as recently as several episodes of The Simpsons animated television series.

Clips from this movie were used in the documentaries Brother Can You Spare a Dime (1975) and That's Dancing! (1985), as well as several fiction features set in the 1930s, including Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The English Patient (1996).

A group of about a dozen good-looking singers-dancers who appeared on The Dean Martin Show and later on their own summer TV series was called The Golddiggers.

The origins of pig Latin, the nonsense or coded language used by Ginger Rogers in the song "We're in the Money," are unknown. Words in this linguistic game are formed by taking the first letter off a word, putting it at the end, and adding the syllable "ay" (as in Rogers' "oney-may" for "money"). One early mention of pig Latin was in a May 1869 edition of Putnam's magazine, although the usage cited is not the same as the modern version of it. According to John R. Hailman in his book Thomas Jefferson on Wine (University of Mississippi, 2006), our third president "wrote youthful letters to friends in pig Latin." There are varieties of the language game in German, Swedish, and French, where a similar coded language was supposedly first used by butchers.

Avery Hopwood's play The Gold Diggers of Broadway, upon which this movie was based, is also credited as the source for the film Painting the Clouds with Sunshine (1951), although that picture does not have much in common with this one.

by Rob Nixon