The History of Frisbee — The Toy That Started With a Pie Tin Lawsuit

The History of Frisbee — The Toy That Started With a Pie Tin Lawsuit In 1944, a 24-year-old American fighter pilot bailed out of his burning P-47 Thunderbolt over Italy and spent 48 days as a POW in Germany. Almost nobody connects that story to what he'd already invented years earlier — tossing a 5-cent cake pan with his girlfriend on a California beach. This video traces the full, tangled history of the Frisbee: how Fred Morrison's "Pluto Platter" became Wham-O's Frisbee (with a single letter deliberately changed to dodge a lawsuit that never actually came), how employee Ed Headrick redesigned the disc and then invented an entire sport — disc golf — on his lunch break, how a New Jersey high schooler's joke motion became the Olympic-recognized sport of Ultimate, and how Wham-O itself nearly collapsed under $36M in liabilities before turning around to aggressively sue rivals over the very name it once tiptoed around. In this video: 00:00 – The pilot, the POW camp, and the pie tin nobody connects 01:09 – Fred Morrison and the 5-cent cake pan (1937) 02:53 – The "Flying Saucer" and the UFO craze 03:24 – The Pluto Platter (1955) 04:19 – Wham-O buys the rights (1957) 05:23 – The real story behind the name "Frisbee" 07:08 – The trademark filed to dodge a lawsuit that never came 07:47 – Ed Headrick's redesign and the "lines of Headrick" 09:34 – How disc golf was invented on a lunch break 11:00 – Headrick's ashes and his final wish 11:40 – Wham-O sold four times in five decades 13:09 – The 2012 financial collapse 14:22 – Wham-O turns around and sues its rivals 16:04 – A joke at a NJ student council meeting becomes Ultimate Frisbee 18:00 – Inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame (1998) 21:07 – What actually built this brand? What do you think built this brand — Morrison's decades of stubborn refinement, or Headrick's redesign and the sport he built almost by accident? Let me know in the comments. Subscribe to Label Lore for the next brand story.