For those of us old enough to remember Y2K, the year 2000, it was an exciting but also frightening time. There was a lot of uncertainty, namely how technology would react. In response to this consumers stocked up on essentials, water, canned food, generators, batteries, and flashlights in advance of the celebrations. I can certainly remember clutching my Maglite as the countdown to 2000 happened. Luckily, we didn't need any of it.
Maglites have been the go to light during natural disasters and power outages for many years. Maglite has made many donations to disaster relief efforts like 9/11. So, it is no surprise that they capitalized on the Y2K fears by promoting and selling Maglite flashlights. Can you blame them? After all it was an entirely man-made fear that looking back seems to be very silly and fun.
Shown below is a very special 3D light they put out for the Y2K celebration. It is one of their first screen printed lights and shows a map of the world that wraps around the light with the year 2000 on one side and on the reverse the "MAG 2000" logo. Very few of these were made and I believe they were done as part of a marketing campaign for the supposed Y2K power outages and sold through regular retailers. If anyone has any of the marketing materials or ads for that campaign I would love to see them. My contact info is at the right.
This light, unlike other full size lights, has no knurling. This was done to aid in the clarity of the screen printing. The screen printing offered many advantages, like the addition of color, which couldn't be obtained with their standard laser etching and was much more durable than die cut decals Mag tried for a while. An AA Mini Maglite was also produced in an identical design scheme but I unfortunately don't have one. I heard they may have been packaged together as a set.
There weren't very many of these lights produced and they are coming up on 20 years old so they are very rare. I haven't seen very many come up for sale but if they did I don't imagine they'd be worth a ton of money like the 7Ds or 7Cs because not a lot of folks know about them. I was lucky enough to find two from a fellow collector and ex Maglite dealer. The serials are 23,205,194 and 23,205,197. They are very close together, only 3 units apart. All of these lights are going to be around 23,205,000 serials. Shown below are both of my Y2K lights with their nearly sequential serials.
I'm always up for trading for lights I don't have or ones I'm really interested in so I'll likely trade one of these away to another collector in the future.
As always I'm looking to buy Vari-Beams and Vintage/Rare Mags. Please let me know if you have any, top dollar paid.
No comments:
Post a Comment