Of all the honors that can be bestowed on people in the entertainment industry, achieving “EGOT” status is undeniably something special. The label refers to anyone who managed to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award, something that only a small handful of entertainers have gotten the chance to do. The latest to join this list is Alan Menken, the legendary songwriter best known for his work on Disney films. On Sunday, Menken won the Daytime Emmy award for Best Original Song in a Children’s, Young Adult or Animated Program, for his work on Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. The award was for the song “Waiting in the Wings”, which was written by Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater, and performed by Eden Espinosa and Hudson D’Andrea.
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.@AIMenken has joined the elite group of #EGOT winners with #RapunzelsTangledAdventure winning the 2020 @DaytimeEmmys award in Outstanding Original Song in a Children’s, Young Adult or Animated Program category. Congratulations! #DaytimeEmmys pic.twitter.com/tqVr0wU0RB
— Disney Channel PR (@DisneyChannelPR) July 27, 2020
This Daytime Emmy win officially pushes Menken into EGOT status, after previously winning eight Oscars and eleven Grammys for his work on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Pocahontas. He also won a Tony Award in 2012, for his work on the score of Newsies.
This actually is not the first time that Menken has gotten an Emmy, but it is the first one that the composer has won competitively. In 1990, he earned an honorary Primetime Emmy for “Wonderful Ways to Say No”, a song that appeared in the anti-drug PSA Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue.
Menken joins an elusive club of entertainers who also have EGOT status, including Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend, and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This honor comes as Menken has quite a few high-profile projects on his plate, including composing the songs for the long-awaited Enchanted sequel Disenchanted, and recording and writing the songs for the upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.
“It’s been a great time for writing, yeah,” Menken said in March of this year. “Production stopped on The Little Mermaid movie. We recorded all the songs and I did four new songs with Lin-Manuel Miranda.”
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