It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen the original “Doctor Dolittle” movie, but a famous lyric from one of the songs serves as the title of today’s puzzle. Each starred answer ends with the name of a group of animals, and right after it in the adjacent Across entry is an imagined “conversation” among those animals, represented by the sounds you would hear from them.
These are all tied together with a revealer at 49D: [Conversation among friends … or a hint to the animal collectives in the starred answers and the conversations that follow them] which is GROUP CHAT.
When I started the puzzle, I was originally going to give the animal noise answers some fairly straightforward clues and tie them more explicitly to each starred answer. [Sounds from owls, who are collectively found in 23 Across] or whatever. But then when I thought of the “Doctor Dolittle” lyric, it occurred to me this theme could be much sillier than it was. I’ve spent 17 years imagining the funny things my cat would say if she could speak like humans, so why not do the same thing with this crossword? There just aren’t many opportunities for me to write clues with sheep making terrible puns.
A few other answers and clues:
