 This episode is largely a remake of "... And I Want Some Candy and a  Gun That Shoots ..." which aired the previous season. The former  episode was all too obviously based on the 1966 sniper massacre at  the University of Texas in Austin, and the network declined to  rebroadcast it because of its violence and the possibility it would  encourage imitative behavior. So Leonard Freeman, writing his last  episode, changed the motive for the sniper into distracting the cops  from another crime (the kidnapping) and had his editors use as much  footage from the earlier show as possible. Six years later, NBC used  the same technique when it acquired the theatrical film "Two Minute  Warning," filming an hour of extra footage about art thieves hiring  the sniper to distract attention from a museum robbery (the film  bombed).