AVI-8 Hawker Hurricane Classic Chronograph 1924US Mr Skelly: A Memento Mori Watch

AVI-8 has spent years building its catalogue on aviation nostalgia and licensed partnerships. Spitfires, Hurricanes, the Imperial War Museums, Peanuts, a Capcom arcade tie-in. The formula works commercially, but most of those watches borrow their emotional weight from something that already existed. The design job is usually translation: take an aircraft or a character, put it on a dial, keep the aviation cues intact.

The new Hawker Hurricane Classic Chronograph 1924US Mr Skelly Limited Edition asks for something different. It is built around memento mori, the old idea that remembering death is what makes life urgent, and the partner is a design studio rather than a franchise. That shifts the watch from tribute to statement, and it is the first AVI-8 release in a while where the theme is doing more work than the airframe.

Mr Skelly Is a Studio’s Own Character, Not a Licensed Franchise

1924us is a design and animation studio founded by Christian Watson, working in traditional handcraft for more than 15 years. Everything the team produces, from animations to logos to characters and backgrounds, is made by hand. Mr Skelly is their own creation: a skeletal figure whose whole purpose is to remind you that life is not forever.

That origin matters more than it sounds. A licensed character arrives with rules, brand guidelines, and a rights holder who wants the property recognisable. A studio’s own icon arrives with the studio’s hand still on it. Watson says the typefaces and numbers on this watch were hand-created by the team, which is a level of involvement most collaboration watches never reach; usually the partner supplies artwork and the brand handles the dial.

It is the same instinct behind the Kojima Productions studio mascot watch from Anicorn, where the appeal was that the character belonged to the creative team rather than to a game. Buyers who care about that distinction tend to care a lot.

The Two Colorways Are Not Interchangeable

Oak Ash uses a rose gold-plated stainless steel case and fixed bezel against a matte black brass dial, with cream applied Arabic indexes and a brown genuine leather strap. It is the warmer, more antique-looking of the pair, and rose gold plating over a memento mori motif lands closer to Victorian mourning jewellery than to a pilot’s watch.

Charcoal Cream goes the other way: black stainless steel case and fixed bezel, matte cream dial, black applied Arabic indexes, grey leather strap. Higher contrast, more graphic, and the variant I would choose. A cream dial with black numerals gives the hand-drawn typefaces somewhere to breathe, and the black case keeps the whole thing from reading as costume.

Both carry vintage-inspired textures and the studio’s custom numerals. Neither is a dress watch, despite the leather straps and the plating on the Oak Ash, and that is worth understanding before ordering.

The case measures 43.5mm across, 11.2mm thick, with a 50mm lug-to-lug. The thickness is reasonable for a chronograph, and 50mm lug-to-lug is not extreme, but 43.5mm is a lot of dial for a design-led piece that trades on detail.

On an average 17cm wrist this will sit large. That is not automatically a problem, since the artwork needs space and a shrunken version would lose the hand-drawn numerals, but anyone below about 16.5cm should treat the measurements as a genuine constraint rather than a detail.

A Quartz Chronograph With a Long Paper Trail

The movement is a Japan Quartz chronograph, caliber M-SII-VD57-D3BKW. The VD57 comes from Seiko Instruments, and its family has been running in affordable chronographs for years, including plenty of AVI-8’s own. It is accurate, it needs a battery every few years instead of servicing, and it will still be running long after a cheap automatic chronograph would need attention. If you want the fuller argument, the case for choosing a battery over a rotor at this price is stronger than collectors usually admit.

What you do not get is a mechanical chronograph’s tactility, and at $285 there are meca-quartz options with a snappier pusher feel. AVI-8 is not selling this on movement appeal, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The crystal is a flat anti-reflective coated mineral lens. At $285, on a limited edition of 350 pieces, that is the line I would push back on. Sapphire has been standard at this price for several years now, and mineral scratches in ways that a watch built around an artwork dial can ill afford. The flat profile and the AR coating help legibility, but they do not solve hardness.

The Edition Numbers Are the Point, and Also the Risk

Each variant is individually capped at 350 pieces worldwide with printed numbering, which is a real limit rather than a marketing window. Compared against the AVI-8 collaborations that ran into the thousands, 350 is genuinely tight, and it is the strongest argument for buying on launch day rather than waiting.

It is also where buyers should be honest with themselves. Limited runs from affordable brands rarely appreciate, and the resale market for character collaborations is thin outside the biggest franchises. The comparison to make is with the brand’s earlier collaborative pieces, like the Snoopy-themed Hurricane with a dual-time layout, which sold well without becoming a secondary-market story. Buy this because you want to wear it.

Specs, Pricing & Availability

My Verdict

I like this one more than I expected to, and I say that as someone who has grown tired of AVI-8’s collaboration cadence. The memento mori theme gives the watch a reason to exist beyond a logo swap, and the fact that a studio hand-drew the numerals rather than supplying a character sticker is the kind of detail that separates a real collaboration from a licensing deal.

I would buy the Charcoal Cream, wear it on a grey or black strap rather than the supplied one, and accept the mineral crystal as the cost of the price point. I would skip it entirely if my wrist were under 16.5cm, or if I wanted a chronograph I could actually swim in.

For AVI-8, this is the more interesting direction. Aviation licensing has taken the brand as far as it goes, and partnerships with independent studios give it something the Spitfire dials cannot: a point of view. The Hawker Hurricane Classic Chronograph 1924US Mr Skelly Limited Edition launches globally on September 25th, 2026, and if the pair sells through quickly, it should tell AVI-8 which catalogue to keep building.