Created 8-Jan-18
Modified 7-Aug-23
The Master. The original ultimate disc. The disc with individualized serial numbers, where if lost, the person finding it could drop it in a mailbox and it would be delivered to Wham-O, then (supposedly) returned to the registered owner.
This gallery contains retail Masters, along with prototypes and one-of-a-kind variations. Masters with tournament or promotional labels instead of the stock label will be found in their respective tournament or promotional gallery.
The early discs have raised lettering, as all early Wham-O models do. The original WHAM-O FRISBEE MASTER TOURNAMENT MODEL lettering lasted for roughly the first 760,000 discs, then the first versions with the MASTER FRISBEE hot stamp briefly appeared. There is some back and forth with hot stamped and raised letter masters until around ID 850,000.
Originally, Masters had labels on the top and bottom, with a standard MASTER TOURNAMENT MODEL gracing the top and the all-important serial number on the bottom. Somewhere between serial numbers 402,811 and 496,190 Wham-O dropped the bottom label and the serial numbers were integrated into the top label.
Every Master produced since its introduction has a copyright date of 1967 tooled into the bottom of the disc, whether produced in 1967 or decades later with serial numbers in the millions. As with all Wham-O discs, the copyright date only indicates when the text was written that's tooled into the disc. The earliest Masters' top labels actually show a 1968 copyright, then inexplicably discs with higher serial numbers have a © 1967 label.
There are at least eight different variations of the actual Master molds, with raised lettering or not, different tooling configurations on the bottom, and different numbers of flight rings on the top and bottom (the Master was Wham-O's only model that has flight rings on the bottom).
As for the famous return policy, while Wham-O would replace broken Masters for free, when Dan "Stork" Roddick got to Wham-O many years after the Master's introduction, all those registration cards were sitting in a closet. It's unclear if anyone ever got a lost disc returned.
Photo copyrights belong to their respective contributors, disc design copyrights belong to their designers