I’m trying to post something here at least three days minimum a week, more if I can swing it. It’s helping me get back into a workable routine. But it’s a busy day at headquarters and I just wanted to toss out something quick that some people may not realize if they’re not the geek I am.
I’ve been getting into watches. I’ll dig into that subject in greater detail one of these days. Suffice to say it was something I did to pass the time during the long Covid lockdown. Just surf the web and read about small tidy engines we strap to our wrists.
Two of the overhyped movies of the summer have been Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Oppie’s huge, Indy’s a dud, at least that’s what the scuttlebutt says. Me, I loved seeing both of them, and it’s great seeing Harrison Ford back in action.
But back to watches.
There’s this company called Hamilton that makes watches. It used to be American owned—from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, of all places!—but now is owned by Swatch in Switzerland.
For some reason, Hamilton has made a name for themselves in recent years designing watches that are used for props in movies. And then they turn around and sell those watches to civilians like us.
Back in the day, they did a watch for Men In Black, which was a retread of a design flashed in the 1950s in a movie starring Elvis. It might well be the only thing Elvis ever had in common with Will Smith! (My friend has one of those old Elvis watches. It’s triangular and very cool.)
Hamilton did the watch Indiana Jones wears in the new movie, even though you never see the damn thing onscreen. He references it, saying it was his father’s, but they never give us a shot of it on his wrist. Weird.
Hamilton did the watch Matthew McConaughey gifts his onscreen daughter, Murph, in Interstellar. Angry that he’s leaving her on Earth to go save the our planet, she flings the watch across her bedroom. Of course, the watch returns later in the movie and is a key plot point and artifact that basically saves humanity.
Hamilton released that watch, now called “The Murph,” a few years ago. It’s cool because the seconds hand on the watch is stamped with the word EUREKA in Morse Code. (You have to really love that movie to get that reference.)
So when that watch came out, watch people complained that it was too big and heavy, even though it was exactly the size of the prop in the movie. So earlier this year or late last, Hamilton released a smaller version of the watch. I think the sad thing is that the word EUREKA was omitted from the seconds hand because—duh!—the watch is smaller, as if Swatch was saying, Tough noogs, watch-dweebs, you can’t have everything.
You can see the smaller Murph here.
Hamilton also made the prop watch used in Nolan’s Tenet, which is a movie I’ll never understand and makes my head hurt just thinking about. The watch is discontinued, but you can still find it being sold at various watch dealers around the world.
It seems as though every time Hamilton releases one of these movie watches, there is a limited edition run that has a special box, which usually sells out fast. If you go to Hamilton’s site, you can see all their movie watches in one spot. Even though the brand is ostensibly “Swiss” these days, they still retain the American aesthetic that people associate with, oh, Elvis, Indy, alien-busting feds, and swaggering Texas-born spacemen.
For Oppenheimer, they didn’t create a prop watch. Instead, they sourced vintage watches from their archives that matched the characters in the 1940s-based film. You can read about that here.
Thanks for letting me geek out. I can’t believe I spelled McConaughey correctly without looking it up first.
Photo above—not a Hamilton—by me.