Broke animal researcher Albert Dooley (Dean Jones) has been trying and failing to teach a duck to follow simple commands. Eventually the lab orders him to get rid of the duck, so he takes her home to his wife, ditzy housewife Katie (Sandy Duncan), and his son Jimmy (Lee Montgomery), who names her Charley. Unbeknownst to him, the bird has been irradiated and now lays eggs with solid gold yolks every time she hears barking. Albert and his lawyer friend Fred Hines (Tony Roberts) plan to sell the eggs to different refineries to get rich without having to pay taxes, but nosy neighbor Finley Hooper (Joe Flynn), who works for the U.S. Treasury, suspects something is up.
The Million Dollar Duck contains examples of:
- Animated Credits Opening: A cartoon of a duck lining up six eggs, which form the zeros in "$1,000,000."
- Binocular Shot: Hooper watches through binoculars from the roof as Albert barks at Charley, causing her to lay an egg.
- Comforting Comforter: Albert and Katie go into Jimmy's room, where they find him and Charley asleep next to each other. Albert pulls the blanket over Charley, leaving Jimmy uncovered, to Katie's dismay.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Albert knows Hooper is up to something when he acts friendly for once.
- Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Charley gains her powers by escaping from the animal lab and wandering into the radiology lab, where she hops into a machine and into a beam of radiation.
- Rule of Pool: The Hoopers have a swimming pool in their backyard. Shortly after Charley moves in with the Dooleys, she escapes and takes a swim in the pool. In their efforts to catch her, Charlie and Hooper both end up in the water.
- Sarcastic Confession: Katie tells the people at every refinery that a duck laid her gold nuggets. They all assume she's joking.
- Saved by the Platform Below: During the climax, Jimmy and Charley are being chased by Jimmy's parents and a bunch of other adults. On the roof of a tall office building, he sets a ladder on the edge over to the next building, and starts crawling across it to escape. But the ladder is only a few inches longer than the gap, and his movements gradually shift it until it falls. Unusally for this trope, we actually see ladder plummet — about five feet, where it's caught on moldings on each building that are so narrow, you didn't notice them!
- Take My Hand!: When Jimmy is stranded on a ladder, Albert reaches for him and says "Put your hand in mine," but Jimmy refuses because he thinks Albert only wants Charley's gold and doesn't care about him anymore. When the ladder starts cracking, Jimmy gives in and grabs Albert's hand a second before the ladder falls to pieces under him.
- Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: Jimmy thinks Charley is a boy, until she starts laying eggs.
