While hunting, Rip Van Winkle - The Sleepy Dutchman, meets some strange little men in the Catskill Mountains. Their elixir makes him go to sleep before 1776 and he wakes up twenty years later, after the American War of Independence is over. With his rusted gun and a foot-long beard, no one recognizes him when he returns to the village. Finally, old Peter Vanderdonk realizes who he is. Rip gets reacquainted with his remaining friends, his grown son and his now-married daughter and child. He then becomes revered as a village elder and patriarch who remembers what the village was like before the American Revolutionary War, and is a favorite with the village children as he recounts all that he experienced in the Catskill Mountains.