Heavy/ABC Cheryl Burke talks about the poor condition of her original Mirrorball Trophies.
Now-retired “Dancing With the Stars” pro Cheryl Burke recently said that the Mirrorball Trophies that she won in the early seasons of the show are in the garbage.
On the January 1, 2024, episode of the “Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans” podcast, Burke chatted Jana Kramer.
“It’s so cheap,” Burke said of the coveted trophy. “The second season and third season of the Mirrorball Trophies were made of lamp shades. Cute, yeah. It was like a joke, but not a joke. That’s why mine is completely like, in the trash, because the mirrors have fallen off one by one,” Burke said.
Burke won the Mirrorball on season 2 with Drew Lachey and again on season 3 with Emmitt Smith.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Mirrorball Trophy Has Changed Over the Years
Burke may have been exaggerating when she said her trophies were in the trash, but there’s one thing that she wasn’t stretching the truth about. The first renditions of the Mirrorball Trophies were indeed made out of lamps.
“There was a limit to what I could spend, so I bought a 3-ft.-tall brass lamp, unscrewed it and took all the pieces apart. Then I reassembled some of the pieces to make basically what we can have today. The original one, the Kelly Monaco one, was literally part of a brass lamp and had it put on a wooden base with the mirrorball on it,” production designer James Yarnell previously told People magazine.
“One of the execs from ABC thought the trophy was too short, so we literally unscrewed it and — probably 10 minutes before we went live — we added a roll of parcel tape between the stem and the base and that elevated it by 2 in. We covered it in gold paper and off it went,” he added.
Ultimately the trophy got a revamp after the company topped making the particular lamp that the DWTS production team had been using. The trophy is now made by an outside company. As Burke pointed out on her podcast, it’s pretty “blingy” these days.
The Mirrorball Trophy Got Renamed in 2023
In 2023, the “Dancing With the Stars” mourned the loss of longtime head judge, Len Goodman. Goodman died in April following a battle with cancer. Everyone loved Goodman and production wanted to be sure that his memory was kept alive. Prior to the newest season, the Mirrorball Trophy was renamed in his honor.
“The Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy will now be lifted on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ like the Vince Lombardi trophy is lifted at the Super Bowl,” executive producer Conrad Green told USA Today. “We wanted to make Len a permanent part of this show, to always remind people the importance he’s had to ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and how much he meant to all of us,” he continued. “Len loves this show and will always be there, looking down on us,” he added.
Val Chmerkovskiy and his season 32 partner Xochitl Gomez were the first couple to win The Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy.
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