John Travolta’s Idina Menzel Oscar Flub Lives On Because It Is Important

Idina Menzel got over John Travolta’s mangling of her name at the Oscars within eight seconds, but that doesn’t mean Travolta’s off the hook. People are still making celebrity news hay out of Travolta’s flub, because people are bored and nothing else has happened in the world.

Much in the way that the mid-90s release of Pulp Fiction got people to pay attention to John Travolta once more, his butchery of Idina Menzel’s name while introducing her at the Oscars has put the spotlight squarely back on Travolta. It’s the flub that won’t go away, an incomprehensible screw-up — think Battlefield Earth, but with tuxedos — that will live in infamy, at least until somebody else does something else dumb.

Just ahead of Menzel’s performance of “Let It Go” from Frozen, Travolta, given the simple task of introducing her, incomprehensibly pronounced her name as “Adela Dazeem.”

Unforgivable, of course, and Travolta has been unable to live down the ignominy since, even though Travolta apologized to Menzel shortly after the Oscars:

“I’ve been beating myself up all day,” Travolta said at the time. “Then I thought… what would Idina Menzel say? She’d say, ‘Let it go, let it go!'”

The interviewer apparently did not ask Travolta what Adela Dazeem would say.

Dazeem… er… Menzel told the “Today” show Thursday that Travolta’s gaffe threw her for a few seconds but that she, unlike the rest of us who hunger for justice, had to move on.

“I heard it, I did,” Menzel said Thursday. “I don’t want to keep saying it because I don’t want [Travolta] to feel worse or anything, because he sent lots of apologies and everything that were really nice.

“Then the orchestra started and then for eight seconds, I said, ‘Get your… together! And like, stop worrying about your name and sing this song! You know, the world is going to see this song.’ So, it took me about eight seconds to get over myself.”

Menzel, whose career has arguably seen a boost since Travolta’s verbal faceplant, said she had to get her ego out of the way and go out and perform anyway. She says she and Travolta are “buddies and it’s all cool now.”

Travolta, meanwhile, is trying to live down the shame, kicking off the Ocala Film Festival with wife Kelly Preston this week. As WebProNews notes, Travolta was introduced to the film festival crowd during a chocolate and champagne event that took place prior to the showing of a digitally remastered version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. No word yet on whether the announcer got Travolta’s name right.