Bill Murray wears a Seiko M516-4009

The Ghostbusters wear their gear on the body, a proton pack on the back, a particle thrower in the hand, and on three of the four wrists a small black Seiko. Bill Murray plays Peter Venkman, the showman of the team that turns ghost removal into a Manhattan business, a parapsychologist quicker with a one-liner than a measurement. The watch is the Seiko M516-4009, sold as the Voice Note.

It was the first wristwatch that could record a voice. By Seiko's 1983 catalog, the Voice Note kept two spoken memos, one of four seconds and one of eight, taken through a built-in microphone, stored on 16 kilobytes of solid-state memory, and played back through a speaker behind the metal plate that cuts across the dial. The same case ran a hundredth-second chronograph, an alarm, an hourly chime, and a calendar, and Seiko built it from stainless steel and carbon fiber, a material most watch cases would not see for decades. It had been in stores a year when the film opened.

The watch fits the premise a little too well. Ghost hunters of the period chased EVP, electronic voice phenomena, the stray sounds people believed were voices caught inside their tape recordings, and Seiko had just put a voice recorder on the wrist. It built the Voice Note for memos, not seances. The company made it in small numbers and the technology looks quaint now, yet a clean one can still run about a thousand dollars, bought less for the eight seconds of voice it holds than for the three wrists it rode in Ghostbusters.