Trivia relating to Ahmed & Salim.
- Acting for Two: As Trager and Paz are the only voice actors on the show, many scenes are this.
- Banned Episode:
- "Episode 4" - Removed from the original YouTube channel for featuring Yasser turning into a "filthy Hebrew" and getting shot in the balls by his sons. The episode also ended with Yasser going on a violent rampage around Israel, burning down a synagogue, killing a bunch of Hebrew politicians, and flying an airplane into a Jewish skyscraper.
- "Episode 7" - Removed for featuring Osama bin Laden singing a musical number about Jewish people being soulless parasites on the face of the Earth and propagating Islamic terrorism against their people. Obviously, this episode was removed as despite it all being satire, it could easily be misconstrued and even reappropriated as antisemitic Islamist propaganda. Osama even breaks the fourth wall in this episode, predicting that the Jews are going to ban this episode from YouTube, which, of course, they did.
- "Osama Bin Laden is Dead" - Removed for being an uncharacteristically serious episode, handling the subject of losing a family member very seriously, by having The Majhayeffs grieve over the death of their Uncle Bin Laden. The episode goes out of its way to make the audience sympathize with the terrorists and feel bad that a bigoted, genocidal warlord was killed.note Obviously, this episode was banned for, again, coming across as propaganda. This was also the last episode of the series ever produced, making it no stretch to assume this is what led to the show's ultimate cancellation.
- Banned in China: The United Arab Emirates banned Ahmed & Salim from their regionalized YouTube search engines because of just how insulting it was to their culture.
- Breakthrough Hit: Probably one of Sugarzaza's most well-known productions, aside from a few of their popular standalone videos, that you may have seen before.
- Executive Meddling: When trying to get Ahmed & Salim aired on television on the Israeli channel Bip, network execs at Bip suggested they remodel Salim's face to give him a peanut head and give him a visible nose and ears. Apparently, they believed that Salim looked too similar to Kenny from South Park and wanted to change him to avoid getting copyright. Tom and Or weren't too happy with this change but tried going with it anyway just to have it air on TV, so they went back and re-edited their pilot pitch to change Salim's face.
- Ultimately, the show didn't get picked up anyway, so Tom and Or were allowed to return Salim's face to its regular round appearance for their internet episodes. To satirize this, they even did an episode called "Salim's New Face", where Salim got a botched plastic surgery and turned his face into the network-ordered peanut shape, which was so horrendously vomitous that it caused Ahmed to barf all over the floor and even got Salim kicked off of television entirely for being so damn ugly.
- No Budget: Ahmed & Salim is a very bare-bones limited animation cartoon, which is written, animated, voice acted, and edited entirely by Tom Trager and Or Paz in their apartment room.
- Orphaned Reference: With the episode introducing Osama Bin Laden being banned, the Season 2 finale about his death makes it hard to get behind as it would be the first episode to reference to Bin Laden being Ahmed and Salim's uncle, let alone someone who meant to much to them.
- However, this same episode was also banned from YouTube, so this all kind of balances out.
- Screwed by the Network: YouTube eventually forced SugarZaza to stop producing Ahmed & Salim, on account of their content being wildly offensive and palatable for doubling as terrorist propaganda. Although, it is partly the creators' fault too, as they were warned about this very thing happening if their future episodes became too offensive and they chose to ignore it completely.
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The Season 2 finale, "Osama Bin Laden is Dead" began production the second Osama Bin Laden died in real life and managed to be released on YouTube just a couple of months or so after the event happened. However, due to the original episode being banned it's not clear when the exact original upload date is. However, since reuploads date back to as far as August of 2011, it can be safely assessed that this episode hit the site very quickly after the news broke out.
