"A gay outing at the park has been planned by the merry trio, and they are off to fetch 'their' fiancée, dainty Dora Standpipe, at Miss Cheddar's Female Academy, close by."

Backslide then steals a conveniently placed, unoccupied runabout, which he uses to kidnap an oblivious Dora while she and the Dover Boys are playing hide-and-seek, spiriting her away to a remote mountain lodge.

However, Backslide soon discovers that, despite appearances, Dora is anything but dainty; she proceeds to administer a sound thrashing to the villain, all the while acting the damsel in distress—crying for help and pounding on the door (with the locks on her side) and on Backslide—until he is himself crying out for help from Tom, Dick, and Larry.

"An alert young scout" witnesses Dora's captivity, and sends a distress signal via semaphore, which reaches the Dover Boys via telegram.

Dora is then escorted away by an odd grey-bearded man in a nineteenth-century bathing suit and sailor's cap who was a running gag throughout the cartoon, appearing periodically to interrupt the story by shuffling across the screen to the tune of Ed Haley's "While Strolling Through the Park One Day".

[11] McLeish also narrated the cartoon The Rocky Road to Ruin of the Color Rhapsody series from Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems, adding to the similarity between it and The Dover Boys.

[12] The characters Tom, Dick, and Larry later made cameo appearances (voiced respectively by Jon Bauman, Jeff Bennett and Rob Paulsen) on the 1990s Fox and WB network series Animaniacs, alongside Slappy Squirrel in "Frontier Slappy", while singing discrediting lyrics about Daniel Boone (voiced by Jim Cummings) until they get fired by him,[13] the Warners in "Magic Time", and in Wakko's Wish.

A segment of the cartoon is featured briefly in an episode of Agent Carter where it is used as part of a subliminal messaging tool of the Black Widow program.