Is throwing a frisbee a sport?
Author
Mike Pharaoh
In 1937, A guy called Watler Frederick threw a popcorn lid at his girlfriend and thought it was fun and had an idea. A couple years later – the Pluto Platter was born. It wasn’t until 1957 that him and his now wife, refined the shape and sold the rights to a toy company called “WHAM-O”. Yes – it took 20 years to perfect a plastic disc. There’s some stuff in between but no one cares.
“Hey Chad, what’s say you and I toss the frisbee around after this round of hacky sack? Have you heard this said to you before? Neither. My name isn’t Chad.”
No one thinks a “Pluto Platter” sounds cool...
Oh also, that toy company renamed it to “Frisbee” after learning that some kids at a college were just calling it that because no one thinks a “Pluto Platter” sounds cool. They were calling it a frisbee after the “Frisbie Pie Company”, they made pie dishes that were basically metal plates that looked like frisbees. Anyway, besides how the frisbee got started but I want to talk about frisbee graphics, who makes them, why people are still designing frisbee graphics and who are these people still throwing frisbees around in 2021.
Who still plays with frisbees?
1
- People who peaked in 1995
- People who own bongo drums
- People who frequent drum circles
- People called Chad or Brad who play disc golf (just call it frisbee hoops)
- People called Shawn who play Ultimate Frisbee after uni
2
- Normal people at the beach
- Normal people with a dog at the park
3
- Ken Westerfield (he deserved his own segment) – he managed to make frisbees actually look cool.
Looking at frisbee graphics is weird, because people are still making graphics in 2021 that look like they were made in 1995. It’s almost harder to design something that looks old than to just design something that looks cool today. Perhaps the people designing them were the ones designing them in 1995 and just never switched jobs? Perhaps they’re just good at designing things that look like they’re from 1995, we’ll probably never know.
SPORTDISC
A big part of the frisbee branding industry is using very extreme yet marketable words like FREESTYLE, or CHAMPIONSHIP, PRO, OFFICIAL, ULTRA, ULTIMATE. Another huge part of this vernacular seems to be using any word BUT frisbee to describe what is essentially a round piece of plastic – SPORTDISC. DISCRAFT. SKY-STYLER. FLYING DISC. Trying to convincing everyone it is in-fact a sport by shoe-horning the word ‘sport’ on to the frisbee seems to be quite popular too. We get it guys – it’s definitely a sport.
‘Wham-o’ is still around today and is selling frisbees.
Shout out Walter, I guess.
