Roy Scheider wears a Casio AA-85

In the pilot's ready room, Frank Murphy closes his eyes, listens to his digital watch, and counts down to find out whether he can still keep his cool. That is how Roy Scheider's LAPD helicopter pilot, a Vietnam veteran, checks his own sanity in John Badham's Blue Thunder (1983), a film that hands him a heavily armed surveillance chopper secretly built for domestic crowd control. The watch is a Casio AA-85, the chrome-cased analog-digital model built on Casio's Module 103, and it belonged to Badham himself. 'This was my own Casio watch,' the director said; the sanity-test sequence was screenwriter Dan O'Bannon's idea, and the prop was fitted with a lizardskin strap and a green military sweatband to set it apart from a stock AA-85. The countdown the film leans on so heavily was mostly an effect. The crew held a button to walk the minutes forward while the seconds stayed at zero, then added the beeping in post, because the watch never actually counted down the way the movie shows.