To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Emmy Awards, the Emmy statuettes handed out at this year’s ceremony will be modified to include an etched “75” on the base of each Emmy.
“We were trying to find a way to honor the historic nature of the anniversary,” said Television Academy president and CEO Maury McIntyre in a statement. “Emmy is all about celebrating excellence, and it has been for three quarters of a century. Those standards really haven’t changed significantly regardless of what era the greatest medium on Earth has been in. In that spirit, we didn’t want to veer too far with Emmy herself.”
In all other respects, this year’s Emmys will be identical to the statuettes handed out in previous years. According to the Academy, the statuettes stand 15.5 inches tall and weigh six pounds, 12 ounces. They are made of copper, nickel, silver and gold in a five-and-a-half hour process by the R.S. Owens company in Chicago.
The Emmy was designed by television engineer Louis McManus in 1948, with 47 other designs rejected before the founders accepted his sketch of a winged woman representing the muse of art, holding an atom that represents science. The name “Emmy” was derived from Immy, the nickname for an early television camera.
About 400 of the new statuettes will be made for the upcoming ceremony. Typically, leftover statuettes are help for the following year’s Emmys, though that won’t be possible this year.