99% Invisible - 142- And The Winner Is

Episode Date: November 26, 2014

There’s a little trophy shop called Aardvark Laser Engraving  down the street from our office in Oakland. Its small but bustling, and its windows are stuffed to the brim with awards made of all kinds of materials and in any … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Trophies are hard for people to throw away. There's actually a service in medicine Wisconsin that will recycle your old trophies and turn them into new ones. They replace the name plates they polish them up and then donate them to nonprofits like the Boys and Girls Club or the Special Olympics. Some of the trophies they get come from people who have passed away. They're surviving relatives in them. And sometimes they're from people who are just tired of their trophies taking up space in their homes. In both cases, people will actually pay the shipping to Madison to avoid putting their trophies

in the trash. Donna Gray, who runs this service with her daughter Janet, says that sometimes people request to be told where their old trophies end up, almost like they're donating an organ. Most of the time, the materials that make them are cheap, but that's not how you measure the value of a trophy. There's a little trophy shop down the street from our office in Oakland. It's small, but bustling, and it's windows are stuffed to the brim with awards made of all kinds of materials and in any shape you can imagine. Chalices, orbs, golfers, gaffles, apples, and plaques. Plenty of plaques. So of course producer Avery Truffleman read them.

We the membership of Mount Zion Log number, present this token of appreciation to Brother Willie Adams. We honor and welcome you. I'm Freeman Asin. And I allow to reveal who that is. Honorable Award of Excellence presented to Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, an appreciation for your contributions to the Nigerian community. Club DJ of the year in 1990.

There's one that says rifle expert. In there are plenty of touchingly heartfelt engravings that you feel that maybe you shouldn't be reading. To my dear husband, Gil, on the occasion of our 35th wedding anniversary, thank you, sweetheart, for 35 loving, supportive, challenging, and exciting years together. God has knitted our hearts together into a beautiful tapestry of love. Julia Radell runs this shop along with her husband, and she's always moved by what people want engraved on their trophies. People amaze me with eloquence and the sincerity and just the way that they can express their feelings.

Because I am from the culture where people did not express their feelings publicly. Julia is from Russia. And it was not always appreciated when people would just express sincerely their feelings, let alone have them engraved and be displayed publicly. Russians just don't give out trophies the way that we do. Americans freaking love trophies. And some of the fanciest trophies in Julius shop, actually some of the fanciest trophies in the world, come from RS Owens in company in Chicago.

My father built the company and his first figure was a guinea pig figure that he manufactured. For guinea pig breeding competitions during the Great Depression, RS Owens has since moved well beyond the humble Guinea Pig trophy. Scott Seagal's father was the founder of RS Owens and Company, and Scott showed me around the factory, like a real bonafide factory with big kilns for the glass plaques and wheeled carts full of castings

and statuettes and rows and rows of industrial grade buffers. This is just some of what we do here. Their massive showroom is full of crazy different kinds of trophies and awards. This was for NASCAR. This is the only time we've made an award with a built-in DVD player. gimmicks aside, RSOans make some truly iconic trophies. That's the Emmy over there. Yes, an Emmy award.

But the Emmy is outshined by its neighbor. I can't believe that's a real Oscar. The Oscar's real name is the Academy Award of Merit, but is now officially known by its nickname. There's lots of mythology around where the name Oscar came from, but the official myth is that the Academy librarian Margaret Herrick took a look at the statue in whispered, he looks like my uncle Oscar. The first Oscar was awarded in 1929 and a number of different factories have manufactured the Oscars over the years. RS Owens has been making them since 1983.

When I saw the Oscar, it was hard to believe that I was looking at the real deal because I'd seen so many knockoffs. The design itself isn't hard to imitate, it's really simple. It's mostly just that style as gold man standing on a real film. Actually, MGMR director Cedric Gibbons originally designed the statue as a night gripping a crusader's sword. And the Oscar has been purposefully designed to be as desirable an object as possible. There's more gold on the Oscar than any other award by far.

There's more gold on the Oscar than any other award we make. Also it's really hefty. It's 8.5 pounds and it's crazy shiny. A lot of polishing goes into what obviously it has to be defect free. So that takes a lot of time. How much time? To polish each one over an hour. Oh man, when I saw it, I just wanted it. It was like primal almost. But somehow Scotty go resist the urge to make one for himself. A lot of people ask me about whether I have an Asgard home and are surprised that I don't. I've never even been interested in having an Oscar at home.

That's exactly what he would say if he had an Oscar at home. But some people do make awards for themselves. People do make awards for themselves. Back in Oakland, Julia gets customers who don't look very athletic at all, picking up trophies that say they are number one in running, or elderly customers buying a trophy for being a young beauty queen queen or world traveler. And this has happened multiple times. Yeah, oh yes, quite multiple.

Yes, it's a common thing. Julia is so not judgmental about this. If giving yourself an award makes you feel better, she's all for it. It's a way of validating your own experience. And even more validating than making yourself an award is making yourself an entire awards ceremony. Welcome to MTV Music Television. Young MTV decided to establish itself with an awards ceremony, because that's a great

way to quickly attract a lot of viewers, get high ratings, and bring in a lot of star power. And they wanted to further establish themselves with a really good trophy. I'm Pat Gorman, and I designed the Moonman statue. That silver astronaut given out at the MTV Video Music Awards, or VMAs. Pat Gorman was part of Manhattan Design, the firm that created the MTV logo, but making this trophy fulfilled a long time dream of hers. I had been a champion baton tourler with my sister.

We had like a doubles routine and we have all these little awards at home and I thought, I wanted to make a great trophy sometime in my life and then this would be a chance. So Manhattan design kicked around a few ideas, but eventually Pat realized that the perfect trophy would be a statue of a man on the moon. Ladies and gentlemen, Rock'n'Roll. For those of you who weren't around, Avery, MTV played a little station ID clip with it off the hour. We're the man lands on the moon and plants the MTV flag.

It was vintage footage of the moon landing, but instead of planting an American flag, the astronaut had a flag that said MTV. I thought, well, let's use that as the statue. And I also wanted to make the statue look like it was floating. So Pat designed an astronaut figure in a wrinkly Apollo suit balancing on one leg holding a little flag that said MTV. She drives some sketches and she gave them to a manufacturer and then she comes back two weeks later.

And he says, here's your statue. I look and it didn't look anything. It was, there was a guy standing with his feet firmly planted and he's saluting. I said, what's he saluting? There's nothing there. Pat's like, this is totally unacceptable. You've got to follow my sketch and the manufacturer goes back to work. We come back in a week and now is she something even more bizarre?

I see a man in a week and now is she something even more bizarre? I see a man in a leisure suit. He's got this whole thing smoothed out. There's not a wrinkle in the suit. Also this leisure suit moonman was still not on one leg and the manufacturer insisted. Nope. Can't happen. It won't balance.

We only have one more week and that's it and they've got to be cast like tomorrow. So I just asked him for clay and he started building it. Pat teamed up with a friend who was a potter. And they made a mold of the guy standing on one leg holding the MTV flag and it balanced. There's a thing about balance where if you line up the head, the center of the belly and the center of the foot, You can balance in almost any posture. And so I just did that, and it was perfect. But the manufacturer really didn't have a lot of time at this point.

And he only got around to making five trophies right before the very first ever video music awards. And there were about 30 awards that were going to be given out. So what do we do? They decided that an usher could take each winner off the stage and fetch the moonman each time and then bring it back on stage during a commercial break. And this meant they could just keep recycling those same five trophies throughout the course of the night.

We'll never run out. So I thought that was brilliant. Yes, at the very first VMAs there were only five trophies and they didn't tell anyone. What could possibly go wrong? Disaster struck. Michael Jackson, Thriller. Michael Jackson wasn't there sadly at the first one but he won all these awards for Thriller. Diana Ross was sitting in the front and she was accepting them for him.

Well I talked to Michael today and he wants me first to thank you, John. Diana Ross, right in the front row, would go up and down the stairs before the usher could take her off the stage and get the moonman from her. And Thriller kept winning more and more awards. And the winner is Michael Jackson, who's Thriller. You won a lot in a row, and she had all five statues in her lap. So they sent an usher to sneak down to Diana Ross and take the statues back. And she starts fighting with him.

Stands up as I remember, it was like a tug of war. And it was like a real disaster. And the Moonman tug of war got a little bit of air time and it was embarrassing. But history has mostly forgotten it because much crazier things have since happened at the VMAs Thank you so much for giving me a chance to win a VMA award No Taylor, I'm really happy for you. I'm let you finish but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time Controversy has become its yearly tradition the whole event worked You know and I knew that if it was successful then it would would go on. It would become like a yearly thing a tradition

Which it actually has and the movement is stayed which is kind of amazing Honestly now that MTV is without music and almost without traditional television This award ceremony has become a big part of MTV's identity and by now they figured out how to get all the winners Their own personalized awards was it's actually a lot harder to plan than you think especially when you get into the high stakes award, like the Oscars. Because back in Chicago, RS Owens doesn't know in advance who the Oscar winners are,

so they've developed a smart solution. Because there's so few Oscars given out and there's so few nominees, we just can grave plates for all the nominees. And the Academy can just quickly screw on the nameplate of the winner and destroy the other nameplates. It's a lot of effort, but then the winners get to have awards that are already personalized.

Because the most important thing about an award is that it has your name on it. I think it was Carnegie who said that the one word that the person would always prefer over all the other words in the vocabulary is his name. Dale Carnegie's Principle number six from how to win friends and influence people is remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. That goes a long way into the into the award business as well because people see their names not only here, it's said, but they actually see it engraved.

Okay, with that said, I'd like to present an award of recognition for producer of this episode to Avery Trophing me. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh, there's so many people to thank. I'd like to thank Franco Linsky, who really helped me fact check and reach out to Pat Gorman.

I'd really also like to thank Fred Sebert. Oh my god, who else is there? I'd really like to thank Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle. You guys are the best. Roman Mars, thank you for making this all happen. This wouldn't happen without you. And KLW, the best public radio station, Arxine architecture and interiors, you make such beautiful buildings,

and always leave, you know, you always have like chocolate lying around for us. Thank you, thank you so much. And okay, thank you. Thank you all. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. All the whole staff are all on Twitter and super fascinating there. But we have pictures and comments on every show we've ever made. And 99pi.org.

Everyone in Radio Topia, just the whole Radio Topia family, you just make me want to be a better producer. You know my mom and my dad, my sister. Radio Topia. From PRX. RADIO TIPIUM from PRX.