The fate of the Jewish character who comes to the door is inspired by the long-standing rumor that Walt Disney was a closet anti-Semite. Evidence is mostly circumstantial, although Walt certainly wasn't above using Jewish jokes of slightly questionable taste. (In The Opry House (1929), for instance, Mickey dances around dressed as a Hasidic Jew. One scene cut from Three Little Pigs (1933) even had the Wolf dressed up as a stereotypical Jewish peddler; the scene was changed after complaints came in from Jewish groups.)
The episode won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual in Animation - storyboard.
As the only episode to have reached a 9.0 star rating on IMdb, this is the highest rated episode of the series so far.
During the Disney-style sequence, references to at least five different Disney movies appear. Meg is drawn with Ursula's legs (The Little Mermaid), both Lois' clothes and the house are in the style of Snow White, the coffeepot talks (Beauty and the Beast), Peter flies in with the style of the crows from Dumbo, and Cleveland as a skunk is directly patterned on Flower (Bambi). (The Tinkerbell ending to the sequence, however, is a television reference; Wonderful World of Disney.)
The reason Brian and Stewie go to the first alternate universe is to see the genetic pig farm, though they never actually do.