Paramount executives owned the rights to a story by Sy Bartlett titled "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 and spoof of the safari genre, 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.