''The Clock Watcher'' is a 1945 American animated

short film A short film is any motion picture that is short enough in running time not to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes ...

produced by

Walt Disney Productions The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

and released by

RKO Radio Pictures RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orphe ...

. The cartoon follows

Donald Duck Donald Fauntleroy Duck is a cartoon character created by The Walt Disney Company. Donald is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet. He typically wears a sailor shirt and cap with a bow tie. Donald is known fo ...

as he works at the Royal Bros.

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic app ...

, 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 A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, steel, nickel, ...

to set the time back a few minutes, then situates himself at his work table. Toys come zooming down past him, 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 Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulant, stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world. S ...

in his cup. The boss's speaker horn sneezes the coffee all over Donald's face and ends up watching him start throwing a

temper tantrum A tantrum, temper tantrum, lash out, meltdown, fit or hissy fit is an emotional outburst, usually associated with those in emotional distress, that is typically characterized by stubbornness, crying, screaming, violence, defiance, angry ranting ...

. After the boss scolds him, Donald apologizes. He tries to squeeze a

trombone The trombone (german: Posaune, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the Brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips cause the Standing wave, air column ...

into a small box, and succeeds by squashing it with a clamp to make it look like a

French horn The French horn (since the 1930s known simply as the horn in professional music circles) is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B (technically a variety of German horn) is the horn most ...

. He then puts a

ring Ring may refer to: * Ring (jewellery), a round band, usually made of metal, worn as ornamental jewelry * To make a sound with a bell, and the sound made by a bell :(hence) to initiate a telephone connection Arts, entertainment and media Film and ...

and a rugby ball in the wrong boxes and deflates the ball. After pretending to work and playing with a

clock A clock or a timepiece is a device used to measure and indicate time. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month and the ...

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 next sees a box containing a

perfume Perfume (, ; french: parfum) is a mixture of fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds (fragrances), fixatives and solvents, usually in liquid form, used to give the human body, animals, food, objects, and living-spaces an agreeable scent. Th ...

come down the assembly line, and sprays it into the speaker pipe. The boss says that the smell is Comhither #5. Donald then 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. A pair of eyes look through the lid of the box, then suddenly pop out and Donald finds out it's a Jack-in-the-box character; he proceeds to play with Jack and hugs him. When the boss tells him not to play with toys, he gets angry and has trouble with Jack in various ways. He tries wrapping the box with Jack, who refuses to go back in and while Donald Duck tries to eat his lunch, the Jack in the box Donald is sitting on bulges up and breaks open causing Donald to slide across the table through gift boxes until his beak hits the grain hopper toy dumping sand on his beak. In the next scene after freeing himself from the gift boxes he was stuck in, he uses a vise clamp to hold Jack down in order to put him back in the box. He gets annoyed by the speaker horn and solves the problem by shoving a

rubber ball A bouncy ball or rubber ball is a spherical toy ball, usually fairly small, made of elastic material which allows it to bounce against hard surfaces. When thrown against a hard surface, bouncy balls retain their momentum and much of their kineti ...

in the speaker. The speaker shoots out the ball as Donald is trying to have his

pie A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts ( pecan pie), brown sugar ( sugar pie), swe ...

, and he 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 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 box has gotten free of the stakes, 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 box, then gets trapped inside, trying to wrestle with Jack until he finally gets free, only to find that Jack has stolen his blue shirt and hat while Donald Duck is wearing Jack's

accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed ...

-like clown costume, neck ruffle and 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 dashes upstairs to beat up his boss. He breaks the speaker pipe in the process before he quits the job.

Voice cast

* Clarence Nash as Donald Duck (uncredited)

Home media

The short was released on December 6, 2005 on '' Walt Disney Treasures: The Chronological Donald, Volume Two: 1942-1946''.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Clock Watcher, The 1945 short films 1945 animated films 1940s Disney animated short films Donald Duck short films Films directed by Jack King Films produced by Walt Disney Films scored by Oliver Wallace 1940s English-language films American animated short films Films about ducks