Mayhem and zaniness ensue during a weekend party in honor of famed African explorer Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding.

Animal Crackers was adapted from the successful 1928 Broadway musical of the same title by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, also starring the Marx Brothers and Margaret Dumont.

Also, the famous art collector Roscoe W. Chandler will unveil his recently acquired painting, After The Hunt, by an artist named Beaugard.

Meanwhile, another weekend party guest, the socially prominent Grace Carpenter, thinks up the very same idea with her older sister, Mrs. Whitehead, as a means of humiliating Mrs. Rittenhouse.

One more complex running joke has Groucho turning the dialogue into a scene out of the Eugene O'Neill play, Strange Interlude, in which the characters continually spoke asides that convey their thoughts.

Incidentally, Groucho had heavy investments in Anaconda Copper and after having lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929 experienced a bout of depression as well as insomnia.

It referred to a real Captain Spaulding, an army officer arrested a few years earlier for selling cocaine to Hollywood residents.

It was long believed that this footage had been lost forever, until a pre-Hays Code print was discovered in the archives of the British Film Institute.

[6] Ironically, Groucho used an even more risqué line in introducing Chico's piano sequence: "Signor Ravelli's first selection will be, 'Somewhere My Love Lies Sleeping', with a male chorus."

(The same situation prevailed in 1968, when stage rights forced MCA to withdraw the Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin' from TV distribution in America, but not Canada.)

Animal Crackers had not been seen in the United States since playing neighborhood theaters in reissue (alongside Duck Soup) in 1949.

Marx Brothers fans were unable to see Animal Crackers until 16mm copies of a Canadian TV print began circulating on the collectors' market.

Some theaters took a chance on showing these inferior, unauthorized copies to paying audiences, but these revivals were not heavily publicized and escaped MCA's notice.

[9] On February 7, 1974, Groucho and his assistant, Erin Fleming, visited UCLA under the aegis of Stoliar's newly formed "Committee for the Re-release of Animal Crackers" (CRAC).

[10] Universal scrambled to appear responsive: a spokesman told a UCLA Daily Bruin reporter that the studio was "delighted" by the interest, and that "we have negotiated with the heirs of the writers (Morrie Ryskind and George S. Kaufman), but they were asking much more than we wanted to spend.

On May 23, 1974, attempting to gauge public interest, Universal screened a sharp new print of the film at the UA Theater in Westwood, just south of the UCLA campus.

Encouraged by the response there – the lines stretched around the block for months — on June 23 the studio screened the film at the Sutton Theater in New York.

[13] The complete, uncut Animal Crackers, which had only been available for decades in an edited version for the 1936 reissue, was restored from a 35mm duplicate negative held by the British Film Institute and released by Universal Pictures in 2016 in DCP format for theatrical distribution and Blu-ray for home video as part of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection.

[14] In the 1990s, a 15-second clip filmed in Multicolor during the rehearsal of a scene in Animal Crackers was found and aired as a part of the Turner Classic Movies documentary Glorious Technicolor (1998).

The clip is significant because it is the earliest known color footage of the Marx Brothers, and also for an appearance by Harpo without his usual costume and wig.