Lloyd Bridges wears a Rolex Submariner

The joke of Airplane! (1980) was to take dramatic actors and have them play absolute nonsense with a straight face. Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers wrote and directed it; Robert Hays is the traumatized ex-pilot Ted Striker, Julie Hagerty the flight attendant, Leslie Nielsen the doctor, and Lloyd Bridges is Steve McCroskey, the air traffic controller whose running line is that he picked the wrong week to quit smoking, then drinking, then amphetamines, then sniffing glue.

The Rolex Submariner on McCroskey's wrist may genuinely be Bridges' own. He had spent four seasons as television's most famous diver on Sea Hunt, and the gold Rolex Submariner was his real-life trademark, so a Sub here reads more like habit than costuming. BAMF Style notes that the screen watch has no date window, which points away from the date models toward an older no-date Submariner, possibly even a customized gold one. Rolex had introduced the Submariner in 1953 as a diving tool, and by 1980 it was one of the most recognized sports watches in the world.