Coca-Cola Used Flexible OLED Displays for Their Glowing Star Wars Lightsaber Bottles

Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker reached theaters last month, and the reviews have been less than stellar. It currently has a 54 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the lowest-rated Star Wars movie after Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace — which it only beat out by a mere 1 percent. The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens both scored over 90%, so fans were excited leading up to the release. Promotional merchandise was everywhere, and that included these Coca-Cola bottles that feature lightsabers lit by OLED displays.

The bottles came in two distinct designs: one featuring Rey and one featuring Kylo Ren — both featuring the cringey slogan “Full Force. No Sugar.” In case you haven’t seen the films, you should know that those two characters both have control of the Force and carry lightsabers. Rey uses Luke Skywalker’s old lightsaber, which is blue. Kylo Ren wields a red lightsaber with a nifty quillon hand guard that you’d think other Jedi and Sith would have thought to use before then. Darth Maul gets points for creativity, but Kylo Ren deserves credit for prudence and practicality.

Moving on from fictional technology to real technology, Coca-Cola wanted to make those lightsabers glow on their labels. To achieve that they used flexible OLED displays, which have just recently started to appear in consumer devices like the Samsung Galaxy Fold. A battery and the circuit to control the OLED display is also concealed by the label, and the battery provides enough juice to illuminate the lightsabers for a total of about 40 minutes. Unfortunately for Star Wars fans in most of the world, only 8,000 of these limited edition Coca-Cola bottles were produced and they were only sold in Singapore. They have almost certainly all been purchased by now. If you’re a serious collector, people are selling their unopened bottles on eBay, but are asking as much as $800 for a single bottle.