Clock Tower

A giant timepiece, visible throughout its locale. Beloved of hunchbacks, of villains who need their capes to billow dramatically, and of snipers with poor tactical sense. Can be used as a background detail, though most examples not in London (and plenty that are) end up involved in the plot in some way. One may be used to increase the suspense in a Race Against the Clock, act as the home or base for the main characters, or become the stage for a Fight Scene or Climbing Climax.

Scenes on a Clock Tower often include:

• Characters nervously perching on the ledge invariably located above the clock face. For whatever reason, escaped parrots also like to perch here. Odds are good somebody will fall. Often leads to subtrope of Clock Tower Stock Clock Hand Hang.
• If inside, there will be plenty of gears and other mechanisms, or at least a rope to ring the bell. Expect a stadium-sized Clockworks Area chamber full of spur gears the size of Volkswagens, on and about which the hero and villain will climb and clamber as they fight. When the gears are invariably jammed with an errant sword or wrench, expect the whole thing to tear itself apart as the designers conveniently forgot to include any sort of clutch, disconnect, or even an emergency "off" switch. Alternately, it might stop the clock on somebody about to be crushed, but only until the wrench breaks. (The mechanism inside real clock towers is often much smaller than in fiction. The workings of the Custom House Tower clock in Boston, for example, are about the size of a file cabinet; those of Big Ben, though weighing about five tonnes, cover the same sort of area as a large table.)

The Palace of Westminster Clock Tower (now the Elizabeth Tower) shows up the most of any real tower; it is more often referred to as Big Ben, the nickname of its main bell (it has five).

This trope is extremely prevalent in Real Life. Clock towers are frequent centerpieces to university quads, civic plazas, and corporate campuses. Used mostly for aesthetic appeal in modern times. Please list only the famous ones under the Real Life section.

Aka Cathedral Climax, a subtrope of Climbing Climax. If someone climbs up one of these with a weapon in real life, duck. See also For Doom the Bell Tolls.

Not to be confused with the video game series Clock Tower or the magazine The Watchtower.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Ann Cassandra: The focus of Chapter 3 is a clock tower that is both a crowning achievement for the man who built it and, unfortunately, the site of a future disaster (a blackout and mass panic), forcing Banjou and Bekku to destroy it.
• Features prominently in Cardcaptor Sakura, most especially in the episode with the Time Card.
• The Castle of Cagliostro: The final confrontation scene inside a clock tower is a rather famous one as it was the first use of a fight scene in a clock tower. It has since become the first title people think of when a series pays homage and sets a melee within this location.
• Dream Hunter Rem: The second episode had one in the middle of an all girls school. It was possessed. Not merely haunted, the actual tower was possessed and the climax has it moving.
• The clock tower in the city in Haibane Renmei (one of the main characters works there).
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: Seeing a clock tower in the middle of the city gives Kakyoin the last clue he needs to figure out DIO's power. To injured to warn his allies, he opts to use his Stand to destroy one of the clock's faces, hoping they get the hint.
• There is one in the high school in K, in the first season. In a flashback to the night of the murder, someone does shout a love confession from the top of it. In the end, when the Red Clan arrives at the island, the Red King Mikoto promptly uses his powers to cut it in half... after which his Right-Hand Hottie, Izumo Kusanagi, tells the students to stay calm.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: Shuchi'in Academy has a clock tower that is noted by Kaguya during the culture festival arc to be the highest point on the school grounds. It also serves as the site of her and Shirogane's First Kiss.
• A clock tower is a recurring setting in Kiki's Delivery Service notably the site of the film's climax.
• In One Piece, during the Alabasta arc, the Big Bad, Crocodile places a huge cannon, which would have been used to kill practically everyone in the city, in the clock tower overlooking the square.
• Princess Tutu: Gold Crown Town has a prominent clock tower, which features figures of a prince and princess, a bird, and a knight that come out when it chimes the hour, paralleling the four main characters. This later turns out to be where Drosselmeyer placed his Rewriting Reality device before his death, which allowed him to control the town through stories even after his death. Drosselmeyer's spirit is seen amongst its gears throughout the series, and he kidnaps Princess Tutu there in Akt 23.
• During the Goran Academy arc of Sunday Without God, a clock tower is where Ai first meets Alice after being unknowingly compelled by Dee. It's full of over-sized gears and other mechanisms that the ghostly Dee floats around, and there Ai and Alice discuss how reality can be subjective and what it means to save the world, and all the clock symbolism foreshadows how Alice and Dee are trapped in a timeloop.
• Sylvia was once tied to the hands of a clock tower in the Viewtiful Joe anime.
• Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo has one in which Syrup lives with Mailpo until episode 25, and Suite Pretty Cure ♪ has another as Siren and Trio the Minor's base.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Aster/Edo Phoenix's Clock Tower Prison card, which is based on the Palace of Westminster.

Comic Books

• Batgirl Barbara Gordon had her base in the Gotham clocktower for a while. The clock face was visible behind her computer, so presumably it wasn't a working clocktower.
• The Powerpuff Girls are restricted to their room until they clean it up (DC issue #27's "Bless This Mess") which gives the villain Him (who keeps making the girls' room messy) time to bring the Townsville clocktower to menacing life.

Fan Works

• In The Blue Blur of Termina, the Clock Tower serves as not only the central landmark of Clock Town, but also the main entrance to the rest of Termina from the Subterranean Forest.
• Persona: The Sougawa Files has the Sougawa Clock Tower, which is a big landmark in Sougawa in the middle of a park. It's where Nobuyuki's hideout is and where the battle against him takes place. After the fanfiction ends, Arata lives there, too.
• Focan in With Strings Attached has a clock tower that chimes the weird time units of Ketafa. The four are so rattled when they first hear it that they dub it Gib Neb. Later, John and Ringo are taken up to see the view—it's the highest building in Focan by a lot—and the vista they see becomes significant to John not long afterwards.

Films — Animation

• Half of the climax of Cars 2 takes place inside Big Bentley, the film series' automotive version of Big Ben, where three of the main characters are briefly tied up to the gearwork.
• In Cinderella, the Prince's castle has a clock tower, which features prominently in the scene where Cinderella must flee at the stroke of midnight. A similar one would appear in Disney's live action adaptation.
• In The Great Mouse Detective, the final showdown takes place on (and inside the clockworks of) Big Ben Tower. The fight ends with the Big Bad falling to his doom.
• Big Ben appears prominently in Disney's version of Peter Pan - as well as the sequel, Return To Never Land.

Films — Live-Action

• The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) features a scene where Richard Hannay has to climb on the face of 'Big Ben'.
• In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the climactic showdown between Spidey and the Green Goblin that results in Gwen's death is moved from a bridge (in the comics) to an old clock tower. Plenty of gear action was involved.
• The Back to the Future trilogy has a prominent clock tower in the town square act as a Constant throughout the different time periods.
• Dr. Ramzi in The Dead Pit conducted his experiments in the basement of the local mental hospital's clocktower.
• In Chaplin's The Great Dictator there's a scene where Hynkel shows off an ornate clocktower to Napoloni and Napoloni claims that it's inaccurate.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie there's a clock tower on the grounds of Hogwarts (unseen in the previous two movies), and there are a lot of meaningful shots focusing on it, time being an important plot point at the end in both the book and the movie.
• In Hook, the pirate town is dominated by a clock tower constructed from the corpse of the giant crocodile that Captain Hook finally managed to kill. Figures into the climax when it's brought back to life...
• The Hudsucker Proxy does this one from the inside.
• Hugo not only presents its own homage to Safety Last!'s clock tower scene, but its boy hero is first seen hiding inside a large clock that hangs over the train station's main gallery.
• James Bond:
  • A silhouette of a man hanging from a clock tower's hands appears in the opening credits of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
  • In Moonraker, Bond fights a mook in a clock tower in Venice.
• In King of Hearts, the hero realizes at the last minute that the bomb the retreating German army planted that would blow up the village is triggered by a clockwork figure in the tower striking a bell.
• The never-named Albert Clock in Carol Reed's Ulster Noir, Odd Man Out.
  • Used to connect the two points of view as the film makes its surreal way to the climax at midnight.
• Jackie Chan pays homage to Safety Last in Project A. In it, there's a fight sequence inside a clock tower and later a dangerous stunt involving him falling off the top of the clock tower.
• Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! has him dangling from a clockface on the side of a skyscraper, though that's not actually a clock tower as such.
• In the film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Lemony Narrator hides out in a pretty fantastical-looking Steampunk clock tower, visible only in silhouette.
• The climactic fight scene of Shanghai Knights takes place on and in the clock tower incorrectly referred to as Big Ben, and includes a brief homage to Safety Last!.
• Spider-Man 2 has a scene where Doctor Octopus kidnaps Aunt May and climbs atop a clock tower. Doc Ock tears off one of the clock hands and throws it at Peter who gives chase.
• The climax of Orson Welles's 1946 film The Stranger takes place inside a clock tower and culminates in the Welles's character being impaled by a clockwork figure in a clock tower.

Literature

• Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged prominently features a calendar tower — a skyscraper with a giant projection screen that simply shows the current calendar day. In fact, the novel opens with a description of this structure. Francisco d'Anconia leaves a parting message here, on the evening of the day he destroys his own company before it can be nationalized.
• In a case of Landmarking the Hidden Base, Kim Newman's pulp homage/parody character Dr. Shade apparently lives in a "secret" apartment in Big Ben. Since in Newman's world he's both a real adventurer and a magazine character (in a sort of takeoff of Direct Line to the Author), readers of the magazine wonder why it's described as secret. In "Cold Snap", his son says he still has the keys to the secret apartment but never uses it because he can't stand the incessant noise of the clockwork.
• The Forbidden Towers, a Choose Your Own Adventure book from The Forgotten Forest series, had one branch in which the viewpoint character entered a Garden of Evil/Hungry Jungle within the Tower of Eaters. The only way out was to climb up to a giant clock on the wall and a chute opening above the numeral 12. One branch had the character take the slow but safe route of holding onto the hour hand as it proceeded to the 12; the other, riding the rapid but wildly jerking minute hand, ended...badly.
• Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge novel A Long Shadow includes a suspenseful climb up the clocktower on the local church. It also inspires one of the series' very rare comic exchanges. The shell-shocked Rutledge is talking to Hamish, the dead soldier (really, the voice of his subconscious) he constantly hallucinates:
  Hamish said, "I wouldna' care to climb that high."
  "Then stay here."
• Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists has a climactic scene in the Big Ben tower, where the evil Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce has hidden his diabolical device which sucks the youthful life-force out of young ladies. He also tied Charles Darwin's brother Erasmus between two of the clock's cogs, planning to leave him to be crushed if Darwin didn't cancel his lecture tour.
• In "A Predicament" by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator winds up getting her head stuck in a clock face in the steeple of a cathedral and is slowly decapitated by the clock hands.
• Not a clocktower, but the climax of Redwall takes place in the Abbey belltower.
• Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels: Gaslight Geezers features Maudlin and Scruff, the hero's sidekicks, crashing a hot air balloon into Ringing Roger, the Big Ben-analogue clocktower, below which just happens to be a statue of King Redfur holding a very sharp upward-pointing lance. They catch the hands of the clock. It's quarter-past-nine, Scruff catches the hour hand and Maudlin catches the minute hand:
  "We'll be fine!"
  "You might be. Your hand's going upwards. Mine's going down."

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The Gentlemen in "Hush" have made their base in a boarded-up clock tower, and the climactic battle takes place there.
  • Sunnydale High's steeple, showcased in "Earshot".
• In CSI: NY's "Time's Up," a gifted mathematician claims to have built a time machine. When it malfunctions and severely injures him, he realizes his zealous assistant will be next, so he makes his way to the precinct where he confesses to the younger man's murder which will occur the following day, then immediately dies from his injuries. The next day, the assistant crashes through the clock in the tower of the building housing the machine. Mac arrives, looks at the time on the now-damaged clock and realizes the mathematician's prediction had come true.
• The Dad's Army episode "Time On My Hands" features lead characters stuck up the town hall clock tower when they try to rescue/arrest a German parachutist who was suspended from the clock. Cue hilarity with the clock mechanism, automated figures and dangerous goings on over a sheer drop.
• Very popular residences for women in DC Comics series. Barbara Gordon/Oracle in Birds of Prey (2002), Chloe Sullivan in Smallville, Sara Lance/Black Canary in Arrow and Barbara Keane in Gotham all live in them. (All of these are references to Oracle's clocktower base in the comics; BoP Oracle obviously; Chloe was the League's Oracle counterpart; Canary because she was Oracle's partner in BoP; and Barbara Keane because in the comics she's Barbara Gordon's mother.)
• One episode of Monk had someone fall off a clock tower. Monk knew that she was murdered by a coworker, but couldn't work out how he could have done it when he was across the school with many witnesses at the time she fell. He bludgeoned her to death with a plank, then put her on one of the hands, knowing that she would fall when a certain amount of time had passed.
• The End Of The Year Show (a topical comedy show broadcast on 31 December 1995) was supposedly set inside the Palace of Westminster clock tower. Since it ran for an hour, there were three gags about proceedings being interrupted by the quarter-hour chimes.
• The pilot of Moonlighting has Maddie and David climbing a clock tower.
• Once Upon a Time has a prominent clock tower atop Storybrooke's library, the inside of which was featured in "The Queen Is Dead" and "It's Not Easy Being Green". Special mention for the fact that the clock magically starts working again once Emma decides to stay in town in the pilot...
• Power Rangers Time Force had their 2001-era home and headquarters in an abandoned clocktower that the 2001-era Red Ranger just so happened to own. They must have found it thematically appropriate, given that they were time travelers. As per usual for bases in the franchise, the finale had Cyclotrons pulling an All Your Base Are Belong to Us and a Trash the Set; the tower ends up being destroyed during the battle.
• In Psych, the season 4 episode "Mr Yin Presents" features Detective Juliet O'Hara dangling from a clock tower. She has been strapped into a chair that has been rigged to the hands of the clock face by the villain of the episode. When the appointed time arrived (6:30), the hands would cut the cable that was holding her up and drop her.

Tabletop Games

• Mage: The Awakening features a Legacy called The Cult of the Doomsday Clock, whose goal is to destroy all of history. Their headquarters is an extradimensional clocktower, which contains Alien Geometries, warped time, and is home to their time-consuming masters who sit beneath the motto "It is always later than you think". The Clocktower also contains doorways to any place on earth.

Theater

• The background for Ebenezer is a projection of a clock tower, which reacts depending on the scene.
• Wicked has the Time Dragon Clock as a setpiece, which comes to life during dramatic moments.

Theme Parks

• The facade of "it's a small world" at the Disney Theme Parks is themed around a clock tower that has a giant smiley face on it. The clock tower itself will even give out the current time every fifteen minutes.

Video Games

• Stage 5-1 in Batman for the NES. Try not to land on the spinning gears.
• Batman: Arkham Knight features Oracle's signature clock tower base.
• The playable introductory scene to Bayonetta is a fight that takes place on the face of a smashed clock tower as it plummets down a seemingly endless cliff. Bayonetta 2 mentions that it is a sacred landmark that's considered very important to the Umbra Witches, who try to defend it from an invading angel army during the tower's final hours which you get to witness firsthand. In Bayonetta 3 the Clock Tower becomes a boss, having merged with the souls of the Umbran Witches that died within its walls and transforming it into a demonic weapons platform.
• There is one in the Neighborhood in Backyard Skateboarding.
• The city of Yharnam in Bloodborne has not one, but two prominent clock towers. The smaller one looms in the middle of the abandoned Old Yharnam and serves as the renegade Hunter Djura's stronghold. The much larger one, also known as the Astral Clocktower, stands in the middle of the Cathedral Ward, but is so huge that you can see it from pretty much every point in Yharnam and its vicinity (interestingly, its apparent size varies from location from location: looking at it from Hemwick Charnel Lane makes it appear much larger than from up close in the Upper Cathedral Ward^note while this can be chalked up to the Alien Geometries of Yharnam, the more likely explanation is that the devs initially intended Yharnam to be smaller, and didn't have the resources to update every other skybox as it grew in scope). We don't get to actually climb the latter in the core game, but The Old Hunters DLC lets us see a nightmare version of it from the inside and climb out through an opening in its clock face after defeating the resident boss, Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower.
• Blue Reflection: Second Light's final Heartscape, an alternate mini-world based on each character's memories and personality, is a sprawling clock tower maze that looks more unnervingly mechanical than the naturalistic or fantastic Heartscapes seen previously. The characters theorize it to represent everyone's heart, and indeed, each character gets a resolution scene for their personal story here.
• In Castle of Illusion, the Clock Tower seves as the fifth level of the Master System version, part of the fifth level of the Genesis version, and a level in the HD remake.
• There's at least one level in each of the Castlevania games that takes place inside a clock tower, complete with moving gears, pendulums, and medusa heads. It's usually where you fight against Death. It's so iconic of the series that non-canon crossover games with Castlevania content such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tend to feature it in some form. The very first game subverts it: the clock is stopped, and the enemies are rippers. Simon's Quest also lacks a clock tower, seeing as its prominent setting is the Transylvanian countryside.
• Civilization 5 and 6: Big Ben is a World Wonder that players can compete to build once their civilizations reach the Industrial Era. In both games, it grants significant economic bonuses to the civilization that holds it.
• Many iterations of the game series Clock Tower will prominently feature a clock tower at some point. In The First Fear, the clock tower is the last area of the game, and is where Jennifer finally defeats both the Scissorman and his demented mother.
• The Curse of Monkey Island, there is one on Plunder Island in Puerto Pollo.
• In Deadly Premonition, the Community Center has a large clock tower, which serves as the site for two of the three final boss battles.
• In Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey, chapter 3 of Cinderella's world revolves around fixing a clock tower to restore time.
• Gondolir, the main human city in Eternum Online, has a clock tower in its center.
• Ultimecia Castle from Final Fantasy VIII is a nonlinear final dungeon reminiscent of Castlevania. Appropriately, its final section is a clock tower where you fight Tiamat, an Evil Counterpart of the series' iconic dragon summon Bahamut.
• Kingdom Hearts has two:
  • The first is in the London section of Neverland. It's the location of that world's Keyhole and, later, an Optional Boss who uses the tower to cast Doom, a spell that knocks out its target on your party members (and, eventually, you) for the rest of the fight and makes them unable to be revived when its time limit expires.
  • The second is in Twilight Town, a recurring location in the sequels. It's a frequent hangout of Roxas's - in both his real life with the Organization and his life in the digital Twilight Town. In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, Roxas, Axel and Xion meet there to have ice cream together after missions. It's also where Roxas and Xion have their final confrontation.
• One stands at the center of Clock Town in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. It's not only the entrance to Termina from Hyrule, it's also where the endgame takes place.
• In MapleStory, one of New Leaf City's many landmarks is Bigger Ben; a dungeon is inside it, infested with Clockwork Creatures.
• The Parisian level in Marvel vs. Capcom 2. In the console version, the time corresponds to your system clock.
• The teaser trailer for Mass Effect 3 shows a human soldier sniping out of a broken Big Ben.
• Myst has two examples. One on the central island contains the mechanism that unlocks the giant gears on the other end, and another, half-broken one on the Selenitic Age is used as one of the sound sources for a radio dish puzzle.
• Huxley's Boarding House, in Mystery Case Files: Broken Hour, features a clock tower that powers the mechanical heart that keeps the psychotic Meredith Huxley alive.
• In Persona 2, Seven Sisters High's Clock Tower is used as the first boss battle setting.
• Resident Evil 2 features one on top of the R.P.D., while Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil 4 feature standalone towers.
• In the third entry of The Room (Mobile Game) series, the Grey Holm mansion has one that you set up on a clockwork map, and you explore the real thing later on, where the goal is to set it up to strike midnight.
• The PC-98 Castlevania clone Rusty has the obligatory stage taking place inside a clock tower, which in this case is also an Auto-Scrolling Level.
• The clock at the Midwich Elementary School plays an important role in the original Silent Hill. Opening it and checking below triggers the shift to the school's Otherworld version.
• The level Time Town from Skylanders: Trap Team.
• The player character in the Gameboy Advance version of The Sims lives for a short while in a clock tower.
• Spagonia from Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations has a huge one smack dab in the center of the city, reminiscent of Big Ben. Sonic has to climb the tower in his younger (in Generations), regular, and Werehog forms (in Unleashed) at some point to traverse through their respective acts.
• Zasalamel's stage in Soul Calibur III is located inside a clock tower.
• In Sunless Skies, one can find the destroyed remains of the Tower of Chimes (Big Ben, in other words) floating around the Floating Parliament, in the outer ring of Albion. One can still hear it's signature (albeit distorted) chime when nearing the area it is in. Interestingly, the transition to the High Wilderness made it ludicrously large, as it several times bigger than the player's spaceship and only marginally smaller than an actual port town.
• Tick Tock Clock in Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart DS — also a Gimmick Level in that depending on the time displayed on the clock you enter to reach the level, the clock will operate fast, slow, screwed up (in which everything will move randomly), or stopped, and different speeds of activity may be necessary to complete certain missions.
• The Disc-One Final Boss of Tales of Destiny is fought in a clock tower.
• One of the levels in Thief: Deadly Shadows takes place inside a clock tower.
• Most of the Tick Tock Isle, is occupied by a Big Labyrinthine Building. It is circular, four storeys high, converging toward the top. The clock occupies the top floor. Only the protagonist calls it "tower", though.
• Hibikino High's place of legend in the 2nd game of the Tokimeki Memorial series is a clock tower named "the Legendary Bell". Its bells are normally broken and can't ring, but it's sort of magical and will ring to give its blessings and grant eternal happiness to couples making their Love Confession near it on Graduation Day.
• The Scarlet Devil Mansion from Touhou Project features one and is the stage for the mansion's Ninja Maid Sakuya in the fighting games.
• The Garal Clock Tower in Treasure of the Rudra The Clock Tower is a countdown timer for The End of the World as We Know It the world will end but the Tower is a timer, one Death Knell for Every Day that passes upon activation, the tower serves another purpose, the clocks on the sealed doors with a clock face above them start to move upon activation, it moves a total of 8 times in one cycle, which unlocks if the clock hand is at the 12 O' Clock position
• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End has Nate and Sully investigating a clock tower for clues to the location of Libertalia. In the process, Nate accidentally brings the inner workings crashing down—which somehow doesn't render him or Sully deaf.
• In Wii Sports Resort, Wuhu Island has the Broken Clock Tower as a landmark, which has the peculiar trait of not having clock hands at all, as said hands were stolen some time ago. However, in its Mario Kart 8 Deluxe appearance, the clock seems to have been repaired.
• The city of Stormwind in World of Warcraft features a very resilient clock tower. Even after said tower is partially melted during the Cataclysm, it still chimes every hour, on the hour.
• Ys III and its remake have the clock tower of Valestein Castle.

Webcomics

• In Champions of Far'aus, the city of Vickerton has a large clocktower, which towers over every other building in the city.
• Girl Genius: Mechanicsburg has an ornate clocktower that is spared the destruction which takes out the observation tower despite its height by merit of being too far from the castle itself for Agatha to use it in her plan to recharge the town's defenses with lightning.
• Though morphE does not feature the example mentioned in the Mage: The Awakening entry, it is set in that universe and depicts the Acanthus watchtower as a giant clock tower looming over the supernal realm of Arcadia.
• With as much weird time shit that goes on in Problem Sleuth, The Clock Tower of Cartesian Alignment has absolutely nothing to do with the plot.
  • It does, however, become a sniper cannon.
• Unsounded: Rahm and Iori Ripa live in the City of Ethelmik's clocktower, where Iori looks after its built-in aquarium and Rahm maintains a Magitek lab and a secret shrine to the Black Tongue Ancient Conspiracy of which he's a member. They're forced to evacuate when the city is razed in a False Flag Operation.
• Woo Hoo! has a scene set in a steampunk clock tower based on the Vancouver steam clock.

Web Original

• Though not a Clock Tower, per se, the BIOCOM tower in Broken Saints pretty much acts as one—it's a Cathedral like complex filled with stained glass and machinery (including a crucifix-like device which controls a Kill Sat,) and it requires a long climb in order to get to. It's also the setting for the final confrontation and battle with the Big Bad.
• RWBY: Beacon Academy sits on a hill above Vale, dominating the landscape. Dominating Beacon itself is the clock tower, the tallest structure in the academy which can often be seen looming in the background of even the city shots. The tower's defining external characteristics are the gigantic clock three quarters of the way up the tower and the very top of the tower which contains emerald light, akin to a lighthouse. Inside the clock tower directly behind the clock face is a huge circular room filled with all manner and sizes of working cogs. This is Professor Ozpin's office, where even his desk and chair are made of working cogs.
• In Stampy's Lovely World, though the clock part is purely aesthetic, the Clock Tower stands as a landmark of the Lovely World to this day and is one of the tallest structures in the entire SLW, at 110 blocks tall.^note It is only beat out by the now-broken 'Raindrops' ride in the Funland, which is 135 blocks tall. It houses the Tick Tock Clock Shop at the base and the Tea Time Tea Shop near the top, and the top of the clock tower is said to be the best lookout spot across the town. It took Stampy and his Helpers seven episodes (Episodes 319-325), two kidnappings, numerous deaths and a vertical parkour race to build the entire thing, and even after construction, several climatic moments in the series have taken place on the clock tower.

Western Animation

• An Adventures in Odyssey video had Dylan fetch a runaway parrot from the top of one.
• In The Backyardigans, a James Bond-themed episode has the villain Lady in Pink scrambling to the edge of a clock tower's hand to retrieve a bottle of chocolate syrup. Pink falls off, but Agent Secret swoops in to save her in time.
• An episode of The Batman had a three-way fight between Batman, Catwoman and Ragdoll inside Gotham Clocktower.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Clock King", the eponymous King uses the hands as a deathtrap to scissor the Mayor. He and Batman also fight on the hands and in and amongst the dramatic (but impractical) steampunkish gears inside. The scene is a direct visual Homage to Castle of Cagliostro.
• Ben 10: While Ben is hypnotized by Sublimino into committing crimes, one of the things he does is steal a clock tower's face as Upgrade. It turns out to be an ingredient for a giant Hypno Pendulum that Sublimino can use to hypnotize people en masse.
• The premise of the Classic Disney Short "Clock Cleaners" revolved around Mickey, Donald, and Goofy cleaning one.
• A Christmas episode of Futurama also had a parrot-fetching; parodied by using a giant digital clock, complete with Fry falling off of and grabbing onto the darkened segments.
• The title characters in Gargoyles move to a clocktower after Xanatos gets out of prison.
• Hurricanes: Helmut and Yorg Beethoven are grandsons of the man who designed the town's clock tower. It benefits them when a new rule for a tournament the Hurricanes want to enter requires all players to have roots in Hispanola.
• The Inspector Gadget episode "The Coo-Coo Clock Caper" has a rather fancy one as part of the villain the Clock Maker's clock factory, where the climax of the episode takes place in: however, the factory winds up destroyed due to the Clock Maker's watch set to make Gadget's gadgets malfunction occurring in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• A Jackie Chan Adventures episode has a clocktower fight at the end. Tohru falls and grabs onto the clock hands (guess how that turned out...).
• The Mr. Men Show: One segment in the episode "Clocks" had Mr. Tickle and Mr. Bump fix one.
• Dr. Doofenschmirtz of Phineas and Ferb plans to steal Big Ben because the numbers on his watch are too small for him to read...
• The first-broadcast episode of SWAT Kats revolved around this, as the villainous Evil Sorcerer the Pastmaster needed a tall clock tower in order to execute the temporal displacement spell that would mix the medieval and modern worlds.
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "Son of Return of the Fly II" has all four of the turtles bound to various parts of a clock tower, to be eliminated at midnight.
• The Rankin/Bass Christmas Special, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, has its plot centered around a clock tower fitted with the singing works of a matching clockmaker's model so as to convince Santa Claus the people of the town do still believe in him.

Real Life

• In London, the Palace of Westminster's clock tower is famously known as "Big Ben", the nickname of Great Bell, the tower's huge hour bell. In 2012, the clock tower's official name was changed from "the Clock Tower" to "the Elizabeth Tower" in honour of Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. Everyone still calls it "Big Ben".
• The Kremlin clock tower, more properly called Spasskaya Tower, in Moscow.
• The Custom House Tower, with its four clock faces, was the tallest building in Boston (by law!) for most of the 20th century. It's also known as the "Four-Faced Liar" because wind conditions cause each face of the clock to show a different time.
• The Allen-Bradley Clock Tower in Milwaukee is the largest four-sided clock in the world with each face measuring just over 40 feet in diameter. The architect of the tower purposefully did not include chimes so that the Westminster Clock could retain the title of "world's largest chiming clock." The tower is a local landmark and known to older Milwaukeeans as the "Polish Moon" due to its presence in the night sky over a part of the city that used to be known for its Polish immigrants.
• The tallest clock tower in the world, with no other qualifiers, is the The Makkah Royal Clock Tower in Saudi Arabia. At 601 meters (1,972 feet), as of 2023, it is also the fourth tallest building in the world. In keeping with the Westminster Clock's title as mentioned above, the Clock Towers do not chime, but instead flash using millions of LEDs on the clock faces and around them. (Also because there is a hotel inside of the main tower, which would keep the guests up at night if it kept chiming every hour.)

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