About

Adele Dazeem is a moniker associated with Idina Menzel, the American singer-songwriter well known for her voice acting role as Elsa in the 2013 Disney animated film Frozen and its critically acclaimed theme song "Let It Go", which stemmed from a mispronunciation of her name by actor John Travolta during the introduction of her live performance of "Let It Go" at the 86th Academy Award Ceremony in February 2014.

Origin

On March 2nd, 2014, Idina Menzel made an on-stage appearance at the 86th Annual Academy Awards ceremony for a live performance of the song, with an introductory remark from actor John Travolta who ended up severely mispronouncing Menzel’s name as “Adele Dazeem.”

Spread

On Twitter, Travolta's fluke led to an immediate flood of double takes and jokes at the actor's expense and quickly took over the live-tweeted gossip about the ceremony.^[24] At 11:19 p.m. (ET), the first parody Twitter account @AdelaDazeem^[23] began tweeting from the perspective of Menzel (shown below) and by the end of the night, “Adele Dazeem” and “Adele Dazim” were trending on Twitter.^[26] As of March 5th, the account has over 20,000 followers.

On March 3rd, Buzzfeed^[27] published a post titled “If John Travolta Had To Pronounce Everyone’s Name At The Oscars” which included celebrities’ names butchered in a similar style, for example, “Brat Spit” for “Brad Pit," and Slate^[29] unveiled “The Adele Dazeem Name Generator” that can scramble people's names in the similar fashion of Travolta’s mistake. On March 4th, one of Menzel’s castmates for the Broadway musical If/Then, Janet Krupin, shared an Instagram of a PlayBill insert for the show that said Menzel’s role would be played by “Adele Dazeem”.^[28]

The same day, Travolta released a statement^[25] about his mistake, saying:

"I've been beating myself up all day. Then I thought … what would Idina Menzel say, She'd say, Let it go, let it go! Idina is incredibly talented and I am so happy Frozen took home two Oscars Sunday night!"

2015 Oscars Redemption

On February 23rd, 2015, Travolta's gaffe came back into the spotlight at the 87th Academy Award ceremony, with the event's host Neil Patrick Harris opening the night with a joke about how British actor Benedict Cumberbatch's name is "the sound you get when you ask John Travolta to pronounce Ben Affleck." Later on, Idina Menzel made an appearance on-stage to introduce John Travolta by saying:

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage my very dear friend Glom Gazingo."

Menzel's payback was met with laughter from the audience and Travolta responded by saying "I deserve that."

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