Being a machine, he is quite strong, allowing him to single-handedly overpower a whole horde of Wheelers without much difficulty, as demonstrated in a scene of the 1985 film Return to Oz.

Tik-Tok first appears in Ozma of Oz (1907) where Dorothy Gale discovers him locked up in a cave, wound down and immobile.

He becomes Dorothy's servant and protector, and, despite his tendency to run down at crucial moments, helps to subdue the Nome King.

That novel also introduces Tik-Tok's monotonic, halting mode of speech: "Good morn-ing, lit-tle girl."

Later Baum published "Tik-Tok and the Nome King," a short tale in his Little Wizard Stories of Oz series (1914).

In the comic book Oz Squad, Tik-Tok's "Internal Clockwork Morality Spring" winds down and causes him to act violent and sexual, though he closely resembles Neill's depiction.

Though no great detail is spent on the topic, Grommetik eventually becomes independent, and, possibly due to disgust at the things he was forced to do, tries to foment rebellion among the tik-toks.

Gregory Benford's 1997 novel Foundation's Fear, set tens of thousands of years in the future, depicts a group of robots named tik-toks, who are responsible for supervising the automated farms on the planet Trantor.

In the film, he is the entire Royal Army of Oz, which is ironic considering his general haplessness, partly from the character's in-book inability to wind up his clockworks for himself.

Due to the heat and physical exertion of being upside-down, according to Murch, Sundin's "limit was two and half minutes from the moment the lid went on."