Vintage 1999 Coca‑Cola Frisbee Flexible Flyer 🥤 NOS Canadian Promotional Cloth Disc

A Cloth Coca-Cola Frisbee? 🥤 Vintage 1999 Flexible Flyer Canadian Promo Disc, NOS

Size: 8 1/4"

Two of the most famous shapes in American pop culture share one soft red circle here: the Coca-Cola contour bottle and the flying disc Wham-O named the Frisbee. The header card reads FRISBEE FLEXIBLE / SOUPLE FLYER, English and French woven into two lines, because this 1999 cloth flyer was made for Coca-Cola Ltd. in Canada. It is still sealed in its bag.

📏 8¼ inches in diameter. New Old Stock (NOS), unused and sealed on its original header card.

🥤 What the Package Prints and Shows

• Header front: the Coca-Cola script with ®/MD and brand/marque, then FRISBEE FLEXIBLE over SOUPLE FLYER in purple letters, on a mosaic of red, orange and green with faded Coca-Cola scripts and bottles, and a painted red Coca-Cola disc with a contour bottle at the right
• The flyer: a red cloth disc with a white stitched rim, a white contour bottle crossed by the Coca-Cola script and ®, and "©1999 The Coca-Cola Company. All rights reserved. Tous droits réservés." along the lower edge
• Back of the flyer: a sewn cloth tag reading MADE IN CHINA and a small elastic loop; the red cloth is thin enough that the logo reads through in reverse
• Header back: a yellow Coca-Cola script over a red disc and bottle, the barcode 0 47256 09188 8, Fabriqué en Chine, a yellow circle printed 13, and a legal panel
• The legal panel in English: COCA-COLA® AND COKE® brand products are produced under the authority of The Coca-Cola Company, and for Coca-Cola Ltd. in Canada.
• And in French: Les produits portant les marques COCA-COLA MD at COKE MD sont produits pour The Coca-Cola Company, ainsi que pour Coca-Cola Ltée au Canada. The printer set "at" where the French "et" belongs.

🥧 From Pie Tins to Frisbee

The flying disc started as a game. In 1937 Walter Frederick Morrison and his future wife Lucile tossed a popcorn can lid after Thanksgiving dinner, and when someone on a Los Angeles beach offered them 25 cents for the cake pan they were throwing, they had found a market. As Morrison put it, if people on the beach would pay a quarter for it, there was a business. By 1948 he and Warren Franscioni were making plastic discs, first called the Whirlo-Way and then renamed the Flyin-Saucer after the reports of UFO sightings.

Morrison sold the rights to Wham-O on January 23, 1957. That June, Wham-O co-founders Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin renamed the toy Frisbee, after learning that college students used the word. The legend behind it comes from Bridgeport, Connecticut, where William Frisbie opened the Frisbie Pie Company in 1871. The story goes that students at nearby universities made a game of sailing the empty pie tins through the air while shouting "Frisbie!" Frisbee is still a registered Wham-O trademark, which forced organized sports like Ultimate and disc golf to avoid the name. In 1998, the year before this flyer's copyright date, the Frisbee was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.

🍾 The Bottle You Could Know in the Dark

In 1915 the Coca-Cola Company went looking for a bottle a person could recognize even if they felt it in the dark, and so shaped that even broken it could be identified at a glance. The Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana, put the job to bottle designer and mold room supervisor Earl R. Dean, auditor T. Clyde Edwards and plant superintendent Alexander Samuelsson. The famous story is that they meant to base the bottle on the coca leaf or the kola nut, could not find a picture of either, and found an illustration of a cocoa pod in the Encyclopaedia Britannica instead. Dean adapted its gourd shape into the contour bottle.

The design patent was issued in November 1915. The first version proved unstable on conveyor belts, so Dean slimmed the middle, and the bottle was approved at the 1916 bottlers' convention. It became the Coca-Cola standard by 1920, and a revised patent issued on December 25, 1923 earned it the nickname the Christmas bottle.

✍️ A Bookkeeper's Handwriting

The script across that bottle is older still. Frank Mason Robinson was the bookkeeper and partner of chemist John S. Pemberton, and he named the drink: Coca for the coca leaves in the formula and Cola for the kola nuts, chosen, he said, because it was euphonious. Robinson wrote the name out in Spencerian script, the flowing penmanship of bookkeepers in his day, and his handwriting became one of the most recognized trademarks in the world. After Asa G. Candler bought the formula in 1888, Robinson served as treasurer and secretary of the Coca-Cola Company, chartered in 1892.

🍁 Coca-Cola in Canada

Coca-Cola arrived in Canada in 1897. In October 1905 the company applied to register the Coca-Cola trademark in Canada and set up a small factory at 65 Bellwoods Avenue in Toronto, the first Coca-Cola bottling facility outside the United States, which opened in January 1906. A Montreal facility followed on April 1, 1909, and had to move to a larger space a year later. By 1921 the Winnipeg plant was so busy it out-produced the company's Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama bottling plants combined. The Canadian company name on this package, Coca-Cola Ltd., still appears on Coca-Cola's trademark notices in Canada today.

🇨🇦 Why the Package Speaks Two Languages

Canada's Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act came into force in 1970, and its regulations require the mandatory information on a prepackaged consumer product to be shown in English and French, although the dealer's name and address may appear in either language. This card goes further than the rule. Its legal panel runs in full in both languages, naming Coca-Cola Ltd. in English and Coca-Cola Ltée in French, and the product name itself mixes the two: FRISBEE FLEXIBLE FLYER for English readers and FRISBEE SOUPLE for French, printed as one block.

❓ Questions People Ask

Is it plastic? No. The flyer is a red cloth disc with a stitched white rim, and the header calls it FLEXIBLE in English and SOUPLE in French.

How big is it? 8¼ inches across.

What year is it? Both the disc and the header card are printed © 1999 The Coca-Cola Company.

Was it made for Canada? Yes. The legal panel says it was produced for Coca-Cola Ltd. in Canada, and every line is printed in English and French.

Where was it made? China. The disc's cloth tag says so in English, and the header says Fabriqué en Chine.

Is it still sealed? Yes. It is new old stock, unused in its original bag on the header card.