Chevy Chase wears a Timex Mechanical

Clark Griswold drives his family from Chicago to a theme park called Walley World, and almost nothing on the trip goes the way he planned it. In National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), directed by Harold Ramis from John Hughes's screenplay, Chevy Chase plays Clark as a suburban dad whose good cheer survives a dead aunt, a wrecked car, and a long string of detours. On his wrist for most of the film, until it is destroyed out in the desert, is a plain gold dress watch: a cushion case, a white dial with no numbers, a black leather strap.

The costume site BAMF Style reckons it an inexpensive mechanical Timex of the kind the company turned out through the early eighties, a guess that suits both Clark and the brand. Timex began in 1854 as the Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut and spent the postwar years selling itself as the cheap, sturdy American answer to Swiss imports. On live television the newsman John Cameron Swayze strapped Timex watches to outboard motors and dropped them off cliffs, and the line "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" stuck to the brand for good.