| The Clock Watcher | |
| Director: | Jack King |
| Producer: | Walt Disney |
| Story: | Harry Reeves Rex Cox |
| Starring: | Clarence Nash John Dehner |
| Music: | Oliver Wallace |
| Animator: | Jack Hannah Bill Justice Judge Whitaker Don Towsley |
| Layout Artist: | Ernie Nordli |
| Background Artist: | Howard Dunn |
| Studio: | Walt Disney Productions |
| Distributor: | RKO Radio Pictures |
| Color Process: | Technicolor |
| Runtime: | 7:34 |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English French |
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.[2]
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 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. He tries to squeeze a trombone into a small box, and succeeds by squashing it with a clamp to make it look like a French horn. He then puts a ring and a rugby ball in the wrong boxes and deflates the ball. Donald reads a book 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 him start throwing a temper tantrum. After the boss scolds him, Donald apologizes.
After pretending to work and playing with a clock for a while, Donald next sees a box containing a perfume come down the assembly line, and sprays it into the speaker pipe. The boss says that the smell is Comhither #5. He then announces that "Production has increased in every single department" except for the gift wrapping department. This makes Donald angry. 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 in the speaker. The speaker shoots out the ball as Donald is trying to have his pie, 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-like clown costume.
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.
The short was released on December 6, 2005 on Walt Disney Treasures: The Chronological Donald, Volume Two: 1942-1946.[3]