Road to Zanzibar is a 1941 Paramount Pictures comedy film starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour, and marked the second picture in the popular "Road to..." series made by the trio.
Paramount executives owned the rights to a story by Sy Bartlett entitled "Find Colonel Fawcett" about two men trekking through the jungles of Madagascar. They felt that its plot was so similar to the recently released Stanley and Livingstone (1939) that it could not be made as written without seeming too derivative, so they turned the project over to Frank Butler and Don Hartman, the writers on the wildly successful Road to Singapore which Paramount had released the year before. Thus reborn as a comedy, the film resembled its predecessor in every important way, with plot taking a back seat to gags (many of them ad libbed), and music. The film was so successful that further "Road to..." pictures were assured.
Chuck and his pal Fearless flee a South African carnival when their sideshow causes a fire. After several similar escapades, they've finally saved enough to return to the USA, when Chuck spends it all on a "lost" diamond mine. But that's only the beginning; before long, a pair of attractive con-women have tricked our heroes into financing a comic safari, featuring numerous burlesque jungle adventures... Written by Rod Crawford
