By Pete Vilmur, Eimei Takeda & Hideyuki Takizawa
When it comes to movie promotional tie-ins, one needn't go much further back than 1977 to see where modern-day campaigns got their start. 1977, of course, was the year Star Wars exploded across movie screens around the world, driven by positive reviews from the press and enthusiastic word-of-mouth on the street.
But Star Wars reached beyond the conventional publicity channels back in 1977, primarily through an expansive promotional tie-in campaign. This got the Star Wars message into restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, and even vending machines -- yes, vending machines -- under bottle caps of Japanese Coca-Cola products.
Few Star Wars tie-in campaigns have stirred as much interest, competition, and confusion among today's collectors as the one staged by Japan's Coca-Cola Company in 1978. Multiple premiums, valuable prizes, and a lot of difficult-to-decipher ad material have given this particular campaign a certain notoriety among both Star Wars and Coca-Cola collectors, with actual facts about the promotion vaguely understood by either.
To that end, we've enlisted the help of Japanese collectors Eimei Takeda and Hideyuki Takizawa to help clarify the many nuances of this noteworthy campaign, which actually produced the crown jewel of all promotional prizes known to today's Star Wars collectors: the Coca-Cola R2-D2 AM radio -- but more on that later.
The basic driver for the Star Wars Coca-Cola campaign was a series of 50 different collectible bottle caps, each depicting a scene or character from Star Wars under a peel-away liner. These were found primarily under the caps of Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta Orange and Fanta Grape, a flavor launched with this campaign. There have been other flavor caps found associated with this promotion, but their small numbers suggest possible regional or test-market distribution.
Beyond the 50 standard caps, consumers could also find cash refund amounts of JPY10, 50, 100, or 500 under the lids (a bottle of soda would have cost about JPY50 in 1978). Naturally, these lids are much harder to find today than the standard 50 picture caps, since most of them were redeemed for their cash value.
Three more potential prizes awaited scores of lucky soda drinkers under the caps. One could win a free soda with a cap depicting the familiar outline of a Coke bottle, or an exclusive t-shirt sporting the Coca-Cola and Star Wars logos in a blue star.
The luckiest consumers were those who popped off a cap explaining they'd won the top prize, the highly-coveted R2-D2 AM radio, which could also be won by mailing in five cap liners for a chance in a sweepstakes drawing.
The radio, which was beautifully designed and produced by the Fuji Electric Company of Japan, was produced in quantities in excess of 10,000, although don't think that number suggests a plentiful supply in today's collectors market. Arriving in a colorful box with attractive Coke and R2-D2 graphics, this rarity is one of the hottest Star Wars collectibles to own these days, and carries a hefty price tag -- $1,000-plus if complete in the original box.
To encourage collecting the 50 different Star Wars caps, Coca-Cola sent thin plastic trays to their distributors as free giveaways.
All 50 caps could be nicely displayed in the tray, which today has become a valuable addition to a full set of caps (a cache of these were found recently in Japan from dead store stock and are consequently a bit easier to come by). A still rarer giveaway was a small paper-craft R2-D2 which could be punched out and constructed to hold the loose caps. Possibly rarer than the plastic tray, the paper-craft Artoo is said to have had extremely limited distribution and given only to those customers who purchased a large quantity of Coke products.
