Call Me Bwana is a 1963 British Technicolor farce film starring Bob Hope and Anita Ekberg and directed by Gordon Douglas.

Zec replied that he had seen a British rock and roll group called The Beatles that had sellout crowds and thought about featuring them in a film.

United Artists made the Beatles film with Walter Shenson and A Hard Day's Night was more successful than Call Me Bwana.

Six writers had already worked on the script, "hundreds of jokes had been written about a bumbling explorer and a CIA agent searching for a U.S. space capsule in Africa, but no filmable story had emerged."

[5] Production director Syd Cain recalled that originally wild African animals from British zoos were to be released onto the golf course sequence but the idea was shelved when they caused expensive damage.

Call Me Bwana is "plugged" in Eon Productions' 1963 Bond film From Russia with Love during a sequence where Ali Kerim Bey assassinates the Russian agent Krilencu with a sniper rifle.

In the original novel by Ian Fleming, published in 1957, the scene happens in a trapdoor situated in Marilyn Monroe's mouth on a poster for Niagara.