Road to Zanzibar

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Road to Zanzibar
1941 movie poster
Directed by	Victor Schertzinger
Produced by	Paul Jones
Written by	Frank Butler & Don Hartman from a story by Sy Bartlett & Frank Butler
Starring	Bing Crosby Bob Hope Dorothy Lamour Una Merkel
Music by	Victor Young
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	April 11, 1941
Running time	91 min
Country	USA
Language	English
Preceded by	Road to Singapore
Followed by	Road to Morocco
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

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 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" pictures were assured.