Movies

Alan Menken Achieves EGOT With Daytime Emmy Win For Best Original Song

alan menken egot
By Hoai-Tran Bui/

Only 16 people in history have achieved EGOT status, and Disney Legend Alan Menken has finally joined their ranks. The longtime Disney composer behind the scores and songs for films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin has scored the coveted EGOT (winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award) with a Daytime Emmy Award for Disney Channel's Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure.

Alan Menken has joined the elite group of people who have achieved EGOT status, completing his collection of the most prestigious awards in entertainment with a Daytime Emmy Award for best original song in a children's, young adult or animated program. Menken won the award for composing "Waiting in the Wings" for the Disney Channel series Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, sharing the trophy with lyricist Glenn Slater, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The song was performed in the series by Eden Espinosa and Hudson D'Andrea.

Menken actually won an honorary Primetime Emmy in 1990 for his work on "Wonderful Ways to Say No" from the anti-drug special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, but this is his first competitive Emmy win. His Daytime Emmy will join Menken's crowded collection of trophies, which include eight Oscars for classic songs and scores from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas; 11 Grammys; and a Tony Award in 2012 for best original score for Newsies.

It was a long time coming, but Menken will be joining the elite group of EGOT winners, which include Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg and, mostly recently, John Legend, Tim Rice, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

If you ask me, Menken should have won an Emmy (or at least been nominated for an Emmy) way earlier with his 2015 ABC series and passion project Galavant, a seriously overlooked musical comedy that somehow earned zero Emmy nominations during its brief two-season run. Which is a shame, because the series featured some real bangers, even if Menken purposely recycled his classic Disney sound in a satire of fairy tale musicals.

But it was only a matter of time before Menken earned that EGOT. The composer is behind some of Disney's greatest hits, and is the second most prolific Oscar winner in the music categories after Alfred Newman, who won Oscars.

This year's Daytime Emmy Awards were handed out June 26 in select categories in a ceremony that aired on CBS. The remaining categories were split between online ceremonies that aired July 19 (digital) and July 26 (children's, lifestyle and animated).

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