When Dancing with the Stars crowns the season 34 winner tonight, the victor will receive a fancy and rather heavy trophy that was named after the late Len Goodman. But when the show first kicked off 20 years ago, the prize for outlasting other celebrities in ABC’s makeshift ballroom looked and felt very different.
Longtime Production Designer James Yarnell tells Deadline that he and Executive Producer Conrad Green only decided around week four of the first season that some sort of physical award should be given in the finale. But there weren’t any shiny prizes for ballroom dancing at the local trophy stores back then, so Yarnell had to get creative — and fast — before the July 6, 2005 finale.
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So he assembled a trophy that featured the mirror ball emblazoned with the Dancing with the Stars logo in cursive and set it on top of a repurposed cylinder stand. Winner Kelly Monaco and her partner Alec Mazo didn’t know that a section of their golden “prize” actually came from Lamps Plus.
“Literally, it was a piece of a lamp,” says Yarnell. “It was a big tall thing with all these pieces in it, and we unscrewed it … there were the two pieces that seemed to fit.”
There’s more that Monaco and Mazo didn’t know about their trophy. On the day of the finale, an ABC executive worried that Yarnell’s homemade prize wouldn’t look tall enough on TV, so the production designer quickly added a roll of packing tape to the bottom to the cylinder to give it some much-needed height.
“I covered it in gold foil,” remembers Yarnell. “We went on camera with this thing held together with a piece of a lamp and tape and that was it. It looked like shiny gold but you didn’t know what it was. I mean, nobody knew what it was.”
Monaco and Mazo were eventually sent home with their own trophy, sans, ahem, the roll of tape. Yarnell continued to make trophies in those early years with the parts from Lamps Plus until the store discontinued the model.
“We had to have it cast,” said Darnell. “That’s why the late ones were heavy, because they were actually cast in that shape from the original.”
For more about the origins of the trophy and how many Yarnell has created over the last 20 years, see the video below.