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Last year, Omega released a special edition Speedmaster to celebrate #SpeedyTuesday, a social media craze started by Fratello Watches founder Robert-Jan Broer in 2012, an excuse for Speedmaster owners to post images of their watches to Instagram. There’s not much more to it than that, but the phenomenon is an interesting byproduct of the current watch collecting culture that has flourished on Instagram and a sound indicator of the Speedmaster’s cult status. The special edition — a handsome reverse- panda dial take on the standard Speedmaster Professional — sold out quickly and that seems to be the case with the new Speedy Tuesday limited edition.
Like the Speedy Tuesday I, the new Speedy Tuesday II is based on the venerable Speedmaster Professional with only small cosmetic tweaks made. This year’s iteration takes inspiration from a rarely-seen reference first introduced 50 years ago — the Ultraman. The original Ultraman did not differ much from the standard Professional, either, but it did feature a long, lance-like orange seconds hand design used on other Omegas from the era like the Admiralty and Chronostop. The reference got its name from an appearance in the early ’70s Japanese TV program, The Return of Ultraman.
So, Ultraman (thew watch) has returned. In addition to the aforementioned seconds hand, it gets a few more orange accents on the tachymeter bezel, in the three o’clock and around the chapter ring. The watch also gets beige lume to mimic the aged look of old tritium lume, and a subtle outline of Ultraman can be seen in the nine o’clock sub-dial. Like the previous Speedy Tuesday special edition, only 2,012 examples are being made, though as of writing all of them have been reserved within two hours of being revealed.
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