It was supposed to be the next Sound of Music. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about ego, animal feces, and a budget that ballooned faster than a Giant Pink Sea Snail. When we talk about the Dr Dolittle film 1967, we aren't just talking about a children's musical. We're talking about a moment in Hollywood history where the "roadshow" era—those long, intermission-heavy spectacles—hit a brick wall. Honestly, the behind-the-scenes drama makes the movie itself look tame.
Rex Harrison was coming off the massive success of My Fair Lady. He felt like king of the world. He was also, by most accounts, a total nightmare to work with. He reportedly demanded that Sammy Davis Jr. be fired because he didn't want to share the screen with him. He fought with the lyricists. He hated the animals. And the animals? Well, they didn't much care for him either.
The Dr Dolittle film 1967 and the Nightmare of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh
Construction started in Castle Combe, a picturesque village in Wiltshire. It looks like a postcard. The producers decided to "improve" it, which went about as well as you’d expect. They built a fake dam. They paved over things. They basically annoyed the locals to the point of sabotage. Legend has it that British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes—yes, that Sir Ranulph Fiennes—actually tried to blow up the set with explosives because he was so fed up with the production ruining the countryside.
That’s not a joke. He was caught and fined.
The weather was another catastrophe. It rained. A lot. This is England, after all. But for a high-budget musical, every rainy day meant thousands of dollars down the drain. The production eventually packed up and moved to St. Lucia, hoping for sun. They found a hurricane instead.
Why the animals were the real divas
You’ve got 1,500 animals. You’ve got a script that requires them to "talk." This was 1967, so there was no CGI. No motion capture. Just trainers, food, and a lot of patience. The animals bit the actors. They relieved themselves on the expensive costumes. The giraffe died on set. It was a logistical apocalypse.
Because the animals were so unpredictable, the crew had to wait for hours just to get a single shot of a dog looking the right way. Imagine the payroll for hundreds of people just sitting around while a parrot refuses to "speak."
A Box Office Disaster and the Oscar Scandal
The movie cost around $18 million. In 1967, that was an astronomical sum. 20th Century Fox was still reeling from the financial hit of Cleopatra a few years earlier. They needed a hit. What they got was a film that critics mostly panned for being bloated and overlong.
💡 You might also like: The Weeknd’s After Hours: Why This Song Still Feels Like a Fever Dream
But then something weird happened.
The Dr Dolittle film 1967 ended up with nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. How? Pure, unadulterated lobbying. 20th Century Fox spent a fortune on dinners and screenings for Academy members. They practically forced the nomination into existence. It’s widely considered one of the most "bought" nominations in the history of the Oscars.
Even with the nominations, the public wasn't buying it. The movie didn't make its money back for years. It effectively signaled the end of the giant, traditional musical era. Audiences were changing. They wanted The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. They didn't want a singing doctor in a top hat talking to a two-headed llama.
The Pushmi-Pullyu and the legacy of practical effects
Despite the chaos, some of the technical achievements were actually pretty impressive. The Pushmi-Pullyu—the two-headed llama—wasn't a special effect. It was two llamas "joined" together, which sounds like an animal rights nightmare today, but for 1967, it was a miracle of costume design.
The music, written by Leslie Bricusse, actually gave us "Talk to the Animals." It won the Oscar for Best Original Song. It’s a catchy tune. It’s probably the only thing most people remember about the film now. But if you listen closely to the lyrics, there's a certain weariness there. Maybe Bricusse was just tired of the rain.
What we can learn from the 1967 flop
If you’re looking to watch it today, it’s a fascinating time capsule. It represents the absolute peak of "Old Hollywood" trying to survive in a "New Hollywood" world. It’s colorful. It’s loud. It’s way too long.
The nuances of the performance are strange, too. Anthony Newley and Samantha Eggar do their best, but they’re often overshadowed by the literal circus happening around them. Harrison doesn't really sing; he talks rhythmically, a trick he carried over from his turn as Henry Higgins. It works, sort of, but it adds to the surreal, disjointed feeling of the whole thing.
- Fact check: The film's total runtime is roughly 152 minutes. That is a lot of animal chatter for a kid to sit through.
- The "Llama" Incident: The animals were often sick because they were being moved across different climates (UK to the Caribbean).
- The Budget: It eventually hit over $17.5 million, which would be over $150 million in today's money.
Watching the Dr Dolittle film 1967 today: A survival guide
If you want to dive into this piece of cinema history, don't go in expecting Mary Poppins. It’s weirder than that. It’s slower.
- Look at the backgrounds. The location scouting in Castle Combe was actually brilliant, even if the locals hated it. The town is still there, and it still looks like a movie set.
- Appreciate the scale. Everything you see is real. No green screens. When you see a giant snail, that's a massive mechanical prop built by people who didn't have computers to help them.
- Note the pacing. Modern movies are edited with the speed of a TikTok video. This movie breathes. Sometimes it breathes so much it falls asleep, but it’s a different way of storytelling.
The Dr Dolittle film 1967 serves as a monument to a specific type of ambition. It was the last gasp of a studio system that thought you could just throw money and animals at a screen and get a masterpiece. It failed as a business venture, but as a piece of Hollywood lore? It’s absolutely priceless.
To truly understand why big-budget movies today are managed the way they are, you have to look at the train wrecks of the sixties. This was one of the biggest. It changed how studios approached "family" entertainment forever. It proved that "bigger" isn't always "better," especially when you're dealing with a lead actor who hates his costars and a llama that won't stop spitting.
To get the most out of this film's history, look for the documentary footage of the Wiltshire production. Seeing the actual scale of the sets built in that tiny village puts the entire financial disaster into perspective. You can also compare the 1967 version to the 1998 Eddie Murphy remake or the 2020 Robert Downey Jr. version; each reflects the technology and the "ego" of its time, but none had quite the same level of chaotic, practical-effect madness as the original roadshow version.