Count Screwloose and J.R. the Wonder Dog are promoting a $10,000 swing contest. They plan to skip town with the entry fees, but a menacing thug from the "Citizens for Fair Play" convinces them otherwise. The contestants: A singing hippo, "Mother Goose" who starts out as an old woman, then sheds her disguise to reveal a pretty girl, and a fan-dancing ostrich. Throughout, a couple of penguins are heckling. The ostrich proves wildly popular, and Screwloose fears he'll have to give the prize to her, when he gets an idea. He dresses J.R. up as the ostrich and sends him out, but the penguins use a box of sausages to expose the dog. The crowd runs Screwloose and J.R. out, and they grab a ride on a train where the penguins are waiting for them.

Various Mother Goose rhymes are portrayed by Hollywood stars for example, Old King Cole's fiddlers three are the Marx Brothers, and Humpty Dumpty is W.C. Fields, who falls while tormenting Charlie McCarthy; Simple Simon and the Pieman are Laurel and Hardy.

Egghead decides his road to riches is through a boxing correspondence course. When he graduates, he takes on champion Biff Stew. Biff pummels him mercilessly (the correspondence course record continues to coach him during the match), but by accident, he knocks Biff out until we see it was all in Egghead's head, after being knocked out by the practice equipment.

The first of eight "Three Mesquiteers" Westerns to star John Wayne.

Porky owns a full-service gas station; he deals with a wide variety of problems, like a bump that migrates to different parts of the car. But his real nemesis is a supposedly sleeping baby in a car whose tire needs changing; in fact, the baby is wide awake and a real brat. Both Porky and the brat end up covered in grease; the irate mother drives off, but the child has tied a pump to a tire, which ends up pulling the whole station into the ground.