Despite the dedication, Sellers' widow Lynne Frederick filed a $3 million lawsuit against the film's producers and MGM/UA, claiming that the film diminished Sellers' reputation, and was awarded over $1 million in damages. Despite this, however, there was a practical reason behind Frederick's suing of Edwards. Her primary objection was that Sellers had actually vetoed the use of outtakes from earlier "Panthers" in his lifetime and that his estate should have had the right to control the use of outtakes after his death. The reason the question of outtakes being used had come up in Sellers' lifetime was that Edwards had shot and edited a three-hour version of "Strikes Again", hoping to recapture the zany spectacle of "The Great Race", with Dreyfus as the melodramatic villain in the fashion of Jack Lemmon's Professor Fate. United Artists vetoed this long version and the film was drastically cut from three hours to just over an hour and a half.