Suomen Filmiteollisuus (SF) began production of the movies a year after the original cartoonist Ola Fogelberg passed away.
The SF screenwriters could not copy the dialogue, so wrote his lines straight and had Pakarinen apply his natural dialect on set.
The location and appearance of the Puupää-couple's apartment building changed radically during the first seven films in the series, albeit their fictional address, Voikukkakatu 5 (Dandelion Street), remained fairly consistent.
A permanent set was built and used from the eighth film, Pekka ja Pätkä salapoliiseina [fi], onward.
The movies followed a typical musical comedy structure, focusing on Pekka and Pätkä's quest for work and/or money, while featuring song numbers and often a secondary male and female protagonist in a romantic subplot.
The major exception to this was Kiinni on ja pysyy [fi] which was an unrelated comedy script which was modified to feature Pekka and Pätkä as its protagonists, resulting in Justiina being absent from the plot.
The secondary male protagonists would frequently be famous Finnish singers, such as Olavi Virta who appeared in three consecutive films in the series as different characters.
The financial disappointment of the eventual movie, Pekka ja Pätkä neekereinä, caused Särkkä to cancel any future films.
The character Pikkarainen, the janitor for the Puupää couple's building, was not from the comics but became a staple of the series following his debut in the fourth film.
Pekka Puupää is a tall and lanky man who lives in Helsinki with his strict and controlling wife Justiina (played by Siiri Angerkoski).
Though the films are very much beloved by Finnish audiences (and receive regular airings on the YLE) the overall quality of the series has often been put to question.
[2] Many however feel that the criticism is harsh, due to the term being quite neutral in Finnish language at the time,[3] and the theme of the main-characters posing as blacks only takes up a small portion of the actual film.
Another more plainly offensive scene was from a dream-sequence in one of the films in which Pekka and Pätkä are bathing in a pot, surrounded by African natives, oblivious to the fact that they are being cooked alive.