Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy are assigned to clean a tall clock tower in a bustling city. The trio takes on different tasks as the clockwork world comes to life: Mickey works from the outside, riding the clock’s second hand and scrubbing the face with a mop, while inside, Goofy tackles the gear teeth with a large toothbrush.
Donald, meanwhile, begins to mop the mainspring, humming Hickory Dickory Dock as he ignores several warning signs. He presses on with his chore until the mop catches the mechanism and lurches it loose, trapping him inside the clock. The moment is playful yet tense as the machinery seems to have a mind of its own, and Donald’s attempts to regain control intensify the slapstick chaos.
Inside the clock chamber, a sleeping Stork blocks Mickey’s path as he tries to wake it. The avian visitor proves stubborn: it refuses to move, and when Mickey does manage to nudge it, the stork looks settled again in a different position, only to end up right back where it started. The stork’s stubbornness becomes a recurring obstacle, turning every effort into a comic struggle.
As Mickey finally decides to eject the stubborn visitor, the stork dives back in and snatches him, carrying him away as if he were a baby. It drops Mickey after a moment, then flies back in, leaving him swinging on a rope with a bucket of water looming above, threatening to drench him at any moment.
Back outside, Goofy is inside the bell’s exterior, humming Asleep in the Deep as he cleans the metal with his characteristic gusto. The clock’s interior comes alive at 4:00 PM, and two mechanical statues emerge to ring the bell: the first, Father Time, and the second, Lady Liberty. They take turns striking the bell, creating a total of four rings that rock Goofy and unsettle the rhythm of the tower.
With each ring, Goofy’s head vibrates, and the chaos escalates. He barely has a moment to regain his balance before the next ring arrives. He glances around, suspicious, and blurts out the playful line, > Mice! The bells continue, and the vibrations intensify, pushing Goofy toward action.
The sequence grows more chaotic as the third ring prompts Goofy to leap out, ready to strike back, while the fourth ring brings a final knock from Lady Liberty’s torch arm, knocking Goofy soundly and sending him into a lovestruck daze. Mickey, watching nearby, repeatedly steps in to try to save his friends, narrowly averting disaster at several turns.
A spectacular chain of misadventures culminates when Goofy, riding a pole, slides through a window into the clock and lands on the mainspring Donald had just reassembled. Their intrusion unravels Donald’s careful setup, and the trio tumbles into the same gear where Donald was stuck earlier. The result is a humorous rhythmic motion—three bodies moving in sync as the clockwork responds to their slapstick antics, a final tableau of chaos and coordinated silliness within the ticking heart of the tower.
