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The Deadly Disc.
Disks, saw blades, shields, manhole covers, and metal plates are effective weapons when thrown. Manhole covers are a favorite among supers in an urban setting, as the strength required to lift one and throw it like a frisbee would induce Fridge Logic if the thrower was a non-super. However, normals can still improvise with CDs, plates, vinyls, or even pizzas, which will be Played for Laughs.
This type of weapon is typically a Pinball Projectile or Precision-Guided Boomerang.
A close relative to Killer Yo Yo and Rings of Death. See also Improvised Weapon, and Improbable Use of a Weapon. Has nothing to do with the Discworld, though it's usually pretty deadly (especially in Fourecks). For discs that hold deadly data, see Magic Floppy Disk.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- If we count energy disks, Krillin's Kienzan or Destructo Disk from Dragon Ball Z which acts like a sawblade that cuts through anything. Only problem is that unless used at very close range, it often swerves every which way, missing the target as a result.
- Frieza probably gave us the deadliest variant in fiction...not only does it cut through anything, but it CHASES AFTER YOU.
- In Dragonball GT, Syn Shenron throws a clock tower's clock at Goku. Goku catches it and throws it back... with enough force to slice a building in half.
- Eternal Sailor Moon does this with a pizza. Though it's technically a Shout Out to her first attack, Moon Frisbee/Moon Tiara Action.
- In One Piece, Doctor Hogback's zombie maid Cindry despised dinner plates and used them as her preferred weapon because she enjoyed breaking them.
- Series II of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman has Eagle Ken armed with a discus in place of his eagle shaped boomerang.
- In Gamaran we see a minor Muhou School minion using a chakram as his weapon of choice. Kashitarou correctly identified the weapon as a Chakram and explained that overall it was similar to a shuriken, but far more dangerous due to his size, sharpness and shape.
Comic Books
- Trash can lids has been used, by Steve Rogers IIRC (he was out of costume and had to improvise).
- Captain America's one-time sidekick Nomad used weighted throwing disks as weapons.
- The Marvel superhero Ricochet, who has the superability to throw discs and have them hit whatever he wants.
- There is a minor villain in the Marvel Universe called Discus. Guess what he hurls as weapons?
- Ozymandias uses his plate as one during the climactic fight of Watchmen.
- One of the New Universe characters had telekenetic control over one object and one object only... a hubcap.
- Issue 174 of the DC Universe's Blackhawk had a villain who fired spinning saw blades
 ◊ from a flying Monowheel Mayhem device.
- Spider-Man once used a manhole cover while battling a Sentinel.
Film - Animation
- Used twice in Toy Story 2. Buzz Lightyear throws discs at Emperor Zerg during the videogame opening sequence and the fight on top of the elevator.
- Elasti-Girl in The Incredibles uses a manhole cover to take out the robot's laser. She doesn't have the super-strength to fling it normally (as evidenced by her effort to lift it), so she stretches her arm around a street lamp and sling-shots it at the robot.
Film - Live Action
Literature
- In Discworld, this is one deadly form dwarf bread takes. It Makes Sense in Context.
- Sharpened plates are used as weapons in Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in The Dark Tower series.
- Engineer Sam Kelly in Born to Run, part of the The SERRAted Edge series by Mercedes Lackey, uses blunted sawblades to great effect, throwing them like a discus. It works in part because he's battling elves highly vulnerable to Cold Iron.
- The the Star Wars Expanded Universe, a small and isolated Force-wielding order called the Zeishon Sha forgoes lightsabers in favor of discblades. The discblades are razor-sharp, imbued with the Force, and usually plated with cortosis to make them resistant to lightsabers. Their fighting style of throwing, guiding, and summoning their discblades makes them experts at telekenetic combat.
Live Action TV
- Smallville season 9 episode "Savior". A Kandorian woman from the future uses blue kryptonite to negate hers and Clark's powers and attacks him. During the fight she throws a circular saw blade at him at high speed.
- In Xena: Warrior Princess, one of Xena's signature weapons is a razor-edged hoop called a chakram.
- In Robot Wars, one of the most lethal robots was Hypnodisc, who's only weapon was a heavy high-speed circular saw. Unfortunately, it was very prone to failure from becoming unbalanced or unable to spin up, and thus rarely actually won tounaments.
Mythology
- Krishna has the ultimate badass version of this. Even other gods are afraid of it.
Tabletop Games
- Forgotten Realms has a first-level spell named 'Flamespin', creating a pinwheel of flame. Unattended, it only hangs where spawned and burns (good to block a window or hatch), but the caster is free to pick it up and beat someone with it, throw it down a corridor, and so on.
- The Eldar of Warhammer 40,000 use "shuriken" weaponry that launch thousands of monomolecular discs per second.
Toys
- LEGO: the Throwbots / Slizers series featured robots that throw disks.
- BIONICLE, the successor of the before mentioned series and Roboriders, reuses the disk as weapons for Matoran. Later, Kanoka Disks were added, fired using a launcher.
Video Games
- The aforementioned Atari 2600 / Intellivision game Tron Deadly Discs, plus its arcade counterpart Discs Of Tron.
- The trademark Tribes weapon is the Spinfusor - a handheld frisbee launcher. Glowing blue frisbees that EXPLODE. It's basically a Rocket Launcher in the list of Standard FPS Guns, with an actual Missile Launcher only used against vehicles and any infantry foolish enough to use their jetpacks enough to raise their heat signatures.
- Even better, the second game's physics engine allows spinfusor discs to ricochet off the surface of water bodies if fired at a narrow angle. And then we haven't even talked about the significant knockback which further cements its status as the rocket launcher equivalent in other ways as well...
- One of the weapons in Vanquish is called the disc shooter. It shoots homing discs that boomerang. Luckily, they don't damage the player on return.
- Dead Rising protagonist Frank West can make use of stacks of plates and CDs as weapons. They work about as well as you'd think too... Until you level Frank up.
- Resistance 2: the Splicer's main fire mode launches circular saws that ricochets on walls and splices everything that gets in their way. And with the secondary mode, it can rev up the saw (which can double as a melee weapon during this phase) and when fired, it hits the enemy and splices it from within.
- In the Half-Life 2 level "We Don't Go To Ravenholm", you can pick up sawblades in the sawmill with the gravity gun and use them as deadly discs. They instantly kill anyone they hit and lodge themselves into walls if meeting them with sufficiently high force.
- In Revolution X, your best weapons against the New Order Nation are CDs fired in rapid-fire fashion.
- Dead Space brings you The Ripper, good for when you want to cut a 2x4 from across the room.
- Lost Planet has the Disc Grenade, which has the added bonus of being a Sticky Bomb.
- Destroy All Humans: Features the Disc Launcher, which will catch a human on it, fly them into various solid objects to lower the health of the human, and rise into the sky towards the end of its run, exploding and dropping them from massive heights.
- Metal Man's weapon in Mega Man 2. Resurfaces in Mega Man Battle Network 3 as one of MetalMan.EXE's signature weapons. Wheel Cutter from Mega Man 10 is a ground-based buzzsaw that can climb up walls.
- From Mega Man X2, we have the Spin Wheel that acts like the Wheel Cutter, and the Spinning Blade from X3 which launches two circular sawblades that curve behind X.
- Rinoa of Final Fantasy VIII has a few weapons that function as this, namely Rising Sun and Shooting Star.
- The Engineer from Ghouls Vs Humans has the Blade Launcher, which shoots discs that rip through enemies and land on the ground, harming anyone who passes over them. They can also be simply dropped down to make a trap.
- Several weapons throughout the Ratchet & Clank series involve launching circular saw blades at enemies. Many of which track. Or split into more blades upon contact.
- The unreleased PC webcam game Disc Devil has you and your opponent fighting each other with frisbees.
- The Disc Gun from Super Crate Box. It's also a Pinball Projectile. Be careful with it.
- There are a LOT of these in the Meat Boy games.
- Dwarf Fortress allows the dwarves to forge large serrated discs, a type of weapon that can only be used in weapon traps. Up to ten discs at a time can be placed in a single trap, and due to the way weapon damage is calculated, they are one of the single deadliest (and messiest) conventional trap types in the game, prone to causing Off with His Head!, An Arm and a Leg, Overdrawn at the Blood Bank, and Ludicrous Gibs all at once.
- The Castlevania: Chronicles Of Sorrow games have the Disc Armour, which uses a disc on a tether to attack you with. You can get this ability by obtaining the foe's soul. Symphony of the Night also features a variant as a Unique Enemy.
- The Turok series has the Razor Wind weapon (nothing to do with the trope of the same name).
- In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Koloktos wields two circular axes during its first phase. If Link is out of range of its arms, it will throw the axes like frisbees, which will keep flying in circles until they hit the wall or floor.
- The first Unreal Tournament had the Ripper, a weapon firing giant rotating sawblades that ricocheted off walls and could decapitate opponents (or its wielder if fired perpendicularly at a wall) with a headshot. Its secondary function fired a blade that couldn't ricochet or decapitate... because it exploded on contact, flinging the unfortunate target into the air and potentially knocking them off ledges.
- The Ripper itself evolved out of the Razorjack, a Skaarj hunting weapon featured in Unreal. The Razorjack launched small, rotating shurikens with the same function as the Ripper while the secondary function fires the weapon Gangsta Style and gives some control over the shuriken's trajectory when ricocheting off something. Emphasis on 'some' control.
- Later installments removed the Ripper but some mods have restored it in some way or another. One such example is the C.U.T.T.E.R. from ChaosUT 2: Evolution. It has the same primary fire mode but the secondary instead launches a blade that shatters upon impact into around a dozen shards that all do damage to whoever they hit.
- Transformers: Fall of Cybertron introduces a new weapon, the Gear Shredder, that fires up to three buzzsaw-style discs that ricochet off walls and visibly get stuck in the characters they hit.
- The Reflector weapons in Ōkami and its sequel are this.
- Jedah is capable of throwing his scythes, in projectile forms they look and cut like sawblades.
Web Animation
- Rinoa's shield/boomerang/buzzsaw Silenced Tear in Dead Fantasy II.
Web Comics
Web Videos
Western Animation
- Depthcharge of Beast Wars fires energy disks with the Fan Nickname of "Energy Pizzas".
- Birdman episode "Train Trek". The villain fires the "Guided Disc" (a giant spinning circular saw blade) at Birdman.
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did this constantly in the 1987 cartoon with manhole covers. Considering manhole covers generally weight about 150 pounds (likely much more on high-traffic New York streets) and the turtles were generally speed fighters, one would think that they would favor an easier to utilize weapon to throw...
- Brainy Smurf in The Smurfs throws a clay discus into Gargamel's face in order to help the Smurfs escape from him in "Tattle-Tail Smurfs".
- Waterbenders in Avatar The Last Airbender can throw razor edged ice disks.
Real Life
- The ancient weapon of the Subcontinent, known as the Chakram. Perhaps most famously used by the Sikhs, it even forms part of the symbol of their religion.
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