The film's plot is based loosely on a screenplay written by Moris Slobodsky and Yakov Kostyukovsky entitled Light-hearted Stories (Russian: Несерьёзные истории); it consisted of two novels about comical adventures of a young student Vladik Arkov, clumsy but very decent.
More than one hundred actors took a screen test for the role of the student Vladik, but Gaidai was not satisfied with any of them.