The Clock Watcher

The Clock Watcher is a 1945 American animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures.^[1] The cartoon follows Donald Duck as he works at the Royal Bros. department store, where he goofs off by breaking gifts and wrapping them poorly.

Plot

Donald Duck arrives late to his job at Royal Bros. as a gift wrapper. He clocks in, uses a magnet to set the time back a few hours, then situates himself at his work table. To Donald's left is a loudspeaker from which his boss gives him orders.

The shift begins as "The Royal Loyal" work song plays next to him. Toys come zooming down past Donald Duck, creating a whirlwind that strips his clothes off. He quickly retrieves them and makes his way over to the pile of gifts. Donald plays with the toys and pretends to work at the same time. He then pulls out his lunch and pours coffee in his cup. The boss's speaker horn sneezes the coffee all over Donald's face and ends up watching Donald, who throws a temper tantrum. As the boss scolds him, Donald now apologizes. After pretending to work and playing for a while, his boss announces that "Production has increased in every single department" except for the gift wrapping department. This makes Donald angry.

Donald wraps a rocking chair with him inside it. Just as a rush order box comes, Donald gets out of his rocking chair and gets the wrapping paper out.

Donald opens a box and finds that it turns out to be a Jack-in-the-box character; he proceeds to play with Jack. When the boss tells him not to play with toys, he gets angry and has trouble with Jack in various ways and has trouble wrapping the box with Jack, who refuses to go back. He uses a vise clamp to hold Jack in his back down. He gets annoyed by the speaker horn and solves the problem by shoving a rubber ball in the speaker. The speaker shoots out the ball as Donald is trying to have his pie, and quickly dodges the ball, but is not fast enough to jump out of the way when the ball hits the clamp and forces Jack in his Jack-in-the-box to spring out and hit Donald into his pie piece. He then decides to tie down the Jack-in-the-box and hold him down by hammering stakes in the floor, only to hear that Jack in his Jack-in-the-box breaks through the floor, before Donald looks out the window and is surprised that Jack went through the floor. He then tries to pull Jack's head out, but ends up getting pulled into the Jack-in-the-box, then gets trapped inside, trying to wrestle with Jack until he finally gets free, but finds that Jack has stolen blue shirt and blue hat while Donald Duck is wearing Jack's clown accordion costume and his nightcap.

He complains until the boss announces that it is quitting time. This excites him, until the boss tells Donald that he has to stay and wrap a few more packages. Donald gets angry and runs upstairs to beat up his boss. He breaks the speaker pipe in the process, possibly resulting in being fired.

References

External links

• The Clock Watcher on IMDb