One of Disney’s favorite composers reached a new level of human achievement this week, with Billboard reporting that Alan Menken won a Daytime Emmy recently for composing “Waiting In The Wings” for Disney’s Tangled: The Series with songwriter Glenn Slater. That Emmy win, Daytime or otherwise, makes Menken the 16th person to achieve an EGOT—which, for those who somehow don’t know, indicates that someone has won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, not counting honorary awards. The basic concept of an EGOT is heavily weighed in favor of composers and songwriters, since they’re the ones who win Grammys, but that doesn’t make Menken’s achievement any less deserved. Just counting his Disney work, he did music for The Little Mermaid, Beauty And The Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Tangled, and Hercules, all of which famously have great music (especially Hercules, which had a better soundtrack than all of them combined, and we’re willing to fight anyone and everyone on that). He even composed the “Star Spangled Man” song from Captain America, and yet 15 people won EGOTs before he did.
And yet… the fact that it’s a Daytime Emmy must sting a little bit, right? Until he wins a Primetime (or “Real”) Emmy, he’ll always have that little asterisk next to his name like Whoopi Goldberg and Robert Lopez, who both also got their EGOTs with Daytime Emmys. It’s still an impressive achievement that most of us could never dream of, but isn’t it slightly less impressive than John Legend’s EGOT or Audrey Hepburn’s EGOT? Actually, Hepburn’s Grammy was for a spoken word album, so that seems like as much of an asterisk as a Daytime Emmy. She really should’ve tried composing some Disney songs.