Alan Menken is Officially an EGOT!

Alan Menken

There is a lot that's uncertain about the year ahead. Among them is the potential for theaters to open, and whether anything will ever return to normal. It's easy to become skeptical during this time and think that nothing good comes during this time. Well, in a strange turn of events, this past weekend brought with it some great news for longtime Disney fans. Composer Alan Menken has finally achieved the illustrious EGOT status, becoming only the 16th person to achieve this. With his Daytime Emmy win for Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, he comes full circle in a fruitful partnership with Disney that has rewarded him greatly. 

"The Little Mermaid" is Still Moving Along Swimmingly After 30 Years

Scene from The Little Mermaid (1989

It's hard to imagine a time when Disney wasn't seen as the biggest studio on the planet. In an age where their streaming service gained 10 million subscribers in a day and Frozen II looks to dominate the Fall box office, it's almost laughable to think of anything beating it. However, the 1980s were a rough period for Disney with a string of animated movies that failed to capture the magic of their first 30 years, going into darker territory with The Black Cauldron and The Fox and the Hound. However, by the back half of the decade, things were turning around and they were planning to revive a long-dead market that would work out big for them. With the help of The Great Mouse Detective's co-directors John Musker and Ron Clements and Off-Broadway's Little Shop of Horrors duo Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, The Little Mermaid was marked as a turning point for the studio. In 1989, a mermaid who dreamed of being "Part Of Your World" became an Oscar-winning phenomenon and set the stage for Disney's comeback, creating the template for every contemporary hit in the process. 30 years later, it's still a masterpiece and high point in a catalog full of them.

Best Song: "Under the Sea" (1989)

Scene from The Little Mermaid

Welcome to Best Song, a new weekly column released on Sunday dedicated to chronicling the Best Original Song category over the course of its many decades. The goal is to listen to and critique every song that has ever been nominated in the category as well as find the Best Best Song and the Best Loser. By the end, we'll have a comprehensive list of this music category and will hopefully have a better understanding not only of the evolution, but what it takes to receive a nomination here. It may seem easy now, but wait until the bad years.

Theory Thursday: The 90's was Disney's Best Decade for Film

Scene from The Jungle Book

Welcome to a weekly column called Theory Thursdays, which will be released every Thursday and discuss my "controversial opinion" related to something relative to the week of release. Sometimes it will be birthdays while others is current events or a new film release. Whatever the case may be, this is a personal defense for why I disagree with the general opinion and hope to convince you of the same. While I don't expect you to be on my side, I do hope for a rational argument. After all, film is a subjective medium and this is merely just a theory that can be proven either way.