BRADLEY MICKEY MOUSE “ANGELS & DEMONS”

The Bradley Time Mickey Mouse Watch: a Swiss-made mechanical timepiece from the Disney character watch line produced between 1972 and 1985 by Bradley Time, a division of Elgin National Industries, descending from the first Mickey Mouse watch sold at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, worn by Tom Hanks as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon throughout Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons (2009), where a watch that the character has owned since childhood and which once saved his life in the source novel functions as the only object on screen that refuses to take itself seriously.

Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons (2009) is the second film adaptation of a Dan Brown Robert Langdon novel, functioning in the film continuity as a sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006) despite being based on a novel published four years earlier. Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of religious iconology and symbology, called to the Vatican when four cardinals are kidnapped by the Illuminati during a papal conclave, and an antimatter device stolen from CERN threatens to destroy the city. The film is set largely in Rome: the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, the Castel Sant’Angelo, and Saint Peter’s Square. Ewan McGregor plays the Camerlengo Patrick McKenna. The film received better reviews than its predecessor and performed strongly at the box office, grossing over $485 million worldwide.

On Langdon’s wrist, as in The Da Vinci Code and as in every Robert Langdon novel and film, is a Mickey Mouse watch. The specific prop used in Angels & Demons is a Bradley Time example, screen-worn by Hanks throughout the production and subsequently sold at auction by Gotta Have Rock and Roll with certificates of authenticity from both Profiles in History and the auction house. It was housed in a shadow display box measuring 9.75 by 2 by 12 inches, in very good film-used condition.

The watch is not incidental. It is one of the most consistently described objects in the Langdon novels, referenced in every book in the series, and Dan Brown has explained its meaning directly. Asked on Goodreads about the significance of the Mickey Mouse watch, he quoted from Angels & Demons: “Although its juvenile dial often drew odd looks, Langdon had never owned any other watch; Disney animations had been his first introduction to the magic of form and color, and Mickey now served as Langdon’s daily reminder to stay young at heart.” More on the film: imdb.com/title/tt0808151

The Watch at Nine Years Old

The backstory Dan Brown constructed for the watch is precise in a way that most character accessories are not. Robert Langdon was given the Mickey Mouse watch by his parents at the age of nine. He has worn it ever since. By the time the novels begin, Langdon is in his forties, which means the watch has been on his wrist for over thirty years, accumulating the kind of worn authority that only objects carried through a significant portion of a life can possess. He is claustrophobic, a strong swimmer, and a Harvard professor; he wears a tweed jacket with elbow patches and carries an almost physical allergy to pomposity. The Mickey Mouse watch is the object that most efficiently communicates these qualities simultaneously. A man who wears a Mickey Mouse watch at forty-something is not trying to impress anyone. He is, in Brown’s formulation, trying to stay young at heart, and the watch is his daily reminder that this is a value worth maintaining.

In the novel Angels & Demons, the watch acquires a plot function that extends beyond characterisation. The crystal of the watch face deflects something, protecting Langdon in a specific scene, an object that has served as a childhood talisman literally becoming a protective device. The film adaptation does not reproduce this precise moment, but the watch carries its literary history into every frame it appears in: the audience that knows the books knows that this is the watch that saved him.

The Heroes Wiki entry for Langdon notes that Dan Brown characterised the watch as a nod to Walt Disney’s influence on modern symbology: a connection between the study of symbols and the most universally recognised character symbol of the twentieth century, whose distinctive silhouette, two circular ears on a round head, is as immediately legible in any culture as any heraldic device. A symbologist who wears Mickey Mouse is making a continuous private joke about his own field.

From Chicago to Elgin to the Wrist of a Harvard Professor

The Mickey Mouse watch has a history that begins not in Switzerland but in Chicago, at the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933, where the Ingersoll-Waterbury Company sold the first Mickey Mouse wristwatch from a single display stand. The watch, developed after Kay Kamen sold the idea to Ingersoll-Waterbury as the company struggled to avoid bankruptcy, featured Mickey’s outstretched arms as the hour and minute hands, a design that made the character’s body the mechanism of timekeeping and gave children a reason to learn to read a clock face. Over 2.5 million examples were sold between 1933 and 1937. The Disney merchandise licence had rescued a failing American watchmaker and established a new category of timepiece.

Ingersoll, which passed through the Waterbury Clock Company and eventually became the Timex Group, held the Disney watch licence from 1933 through 1968. After a transitional period during which several companies produced licensed Mickey watches, many sold exclusively at Disneyland, Elgin National Industries acquired the lucrative Disney contract on January 1, 1972. The company’s Bradley Time division, named for the Bradley family that had founded a watch importing business in the nineteenth century and eventually merged into Elgin, took over production of Disney character watches and continued until 1987, when Lorus, a Seiko subsidiary, acquired the licence in turn.

Bradley Time watches from the 1972 to 1987 period are Swiss-made mechanical pieces, typically carrying movements from established Swiss ebauche suppliers, with dials featuring Mickey in the characteristic pose: both hands raised, the famous white gloves serving as the watch’s hands in some designs and appearing decoratively on dials in others. The watches were marketed as children’s pieces at accessible prices, which is precisely the point. A Mickey Mouse watch is not a luxury object. It is an object designed for children who need to learn to tell time and need a reason to look at their wrist to do it.

Indiana Jones Has a Whip; Langdon Has Mickey

The DISboards.com thread from 2006, in which a viewer who had not read the novels was surprised to see Tom Hanks wearing a Mickey Mouse watch in The Da Vinci Code, captures the effect the prop produces on an unprepared audience: the juxtaposition of a Harvard professor unraveling ancient conspiracies in the Louvre while wearing a child’s novelty watch is genuinely funny, and deliberately so. One commenter in the thread noted the essential character comparison: “Indiana Jones has his whip, Robert has Mickey.” The whip is an instrument of action, leather and violence. Mickey Mouse is an instrument of childhood, plastic and cheerfulness. The contrast between the adventures both characters have and the accessories they carry is one of the reliable sources of comedy in both franchises.

Ron Howard’s adaptation carries the watch faithfully from book to screen not as an afterthought but as one of the few elements of Langdon’s characterisation that the films preserve completely from the novels. The tweed jacket appears; the Mickey Mouse watch appears; the Harvard professorial credibility appears. Everything else in the story, the Illuminati, the antimatter, the four ancient altars of science in Rome, the midnight countdown, exists in a register of extravagant thriller machinery that the watch gently but persistently refuses to take seriously. The most important symbol in Angels & Demons may not be the Illuminati diamond or the ambigrams that appear throughout the story. It may be the small round dial on Robert Langdon’s wrist, where a cartoon mouse is telling him what time it is.

More on the Bradley Mickey Mouse watch: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse_watch and on the Langdon character: danbrown.com/robert-langdon

Technical note: Bradley Time Mickey Mouse watch, produced between 1972 and 1985. Swiss-made mechanical movement. Dial featuring Mickey Mouse with characteristic raised-arm design. Bradley Time was the Disney character watch division of Elgin National Industries, Inc., which acquired the Disney watch licence on January 1, 1972. Bradley Time held the licence until 1987, when Lorus, a Seiko subsidiary, acquired it. The Disney character watch history begins with the Ingersoll-Waterbury Company, which produced the first Mickey Mouse wristwatch for the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in June 1933; over 2.5 million examples sold between 1933 and 1937. Ingersoll held the Disney licence through 1968. The character explanation for the watch appears in Angels & Demons (novel, 2000): Langdon received the watch from his parents at age nine; it serves as his daily reminder to stay young at heart. The watch crystal deflects a projectile and saves Langdon’s life in the source novel; this scene does not appear in the film. Screen-worn example from Angels & Demons sold at auction by Gotta Have Rock and Roll with Profiles in History certificate of authenticity, housed in a shadow display box measuring 9.75 x 2 x 12 inches. Worn by Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in Angels & Demons (2009), directed by Ron Howard, and in The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Inferno (2016).