To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Emmy Awards, the Emmy statuettes to be awarded at this year’s ceremony will be modified to include “75” engraved at the base of each Emmy.
“We were trying to find a way to honor the historic nature of the anniversary,” Television Academy President and CEO Maury McIntyre said in a statement. “The Emmy is about celebrating excellence, and it has been for three-quarters of a century. Those standards haven’t really changed significantly, regardless of what era Earth’s largest medium has been in. In that spirit, we didn’t want to stray too far with Emmy herself.”
In all other respects, this year’s Emmy Awards will be identical to statuettes awarded in previous years. According to the Academy, the statuettes are 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 RS 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 representing science. The name “Emmy” is derived from Immy, the nickname of an early television cameraman.
Some 400 of the new statuettes will be made for the upcoming ceremony. Leftover statuettes are usually a handout for the following year’s Emmy Awards, although that won’t be possible this year.