Development George Armitage had met Corman at 20th Century Fox when the latter was making ''
The St Valentine's Day Massacre. Armitage later recalled he wrote a script — "it was called either Carrot Butts
or A Christmas Carrot'' — which had animated cartoon characters,
Bugs Bunny and so on, coming to life. It was about the studio systems and all this stuff." Armitage remembers the concept just being "a sentence, and that's what we went with... He let you make it your own, and I did." "It was a very inexpensive film", said Corman. "It was shot with a skeleton crew, with a cast of almost entirely amateur actors. Only the leads were professionals."
Stephanie Rothman had been Corman's assistant in the mid-60s but taken a sabbatical from the industry after making her directorial debut with ''
It's a Bikini World. She went back to work with Corman on Gas-s-s-s'' as a production manager along with her husband Charles Swartz. "I had a wonderful time working on that film," she later recalled. "I loved it, I really did." She adds the film "was constantly being re-written as we were shooting." The film features a tribute to
Edgar Allan Poe, an author who provided the stories for several Corman films in the early 1960s. Corman says, "It was actually a second thought when we put Poe in it. We just started putting things in. In the original concept, he wasn't in it. And we just decided to put him in on a motorcycle — it seemed appropriate." "There was some sense of disorganization and experimentation as we went along", says Corman. Corman said there were themes in the film "which go back through all my previous pictures, such as the theme of the destruction of the world which I've played with to a certain extent, and there are some certain political and religious overtones I've dealt with before but I've never put them all together like this. The film became something I firmly believe in." However,
Samuel Z. Arkoff of AIP recalled it differently: ==Reception==