Travolta apologizes for Idina Menzel flub; bad-name game emerges

John Travolta has apologized to Tony Award-winner Idina Menzel for mangling the pronunciation of her name during the Oscars telecast, saying he’d been “beating myself up” over it.

On Sunday night’s Academy Awards show, Travolta took the stage and introduced Menzel, but he seemed to say “Adele Dazeem” instead. An estimated 43 million people were watching, and social media has been mocking him relentlessly ever since, especially since he attended rehearsals.

Menzel, who played Maureen Johnson in “Rent” onstage and on screen and Elphaba in “Wicked,” seemed unperturbed by the flub as she sang out “Let It Go,” from the animated film “Frozen.”

Travolta said in a statement released Tuesday: “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!”

A Twitter account with the handle “adeladazeem” went up immediately after the mistake and has almost 20,000 followers. On Facebook, a Travolta-fier Name Generator, which butchers any name typed in, became immensely popular.

And then the Adele Dazeem name generator turned up on Slate.com. The online widget lets you Travoltify any name to see just how Travolta himself would flub it, and you can even share your Travoltified name via Facebook or Twitter.

Let’s do this: Here is a list of 10 popular Las Vegas names Travoltified.

1. Oscar and Carolyn Goodman, Former and current Las Vegas mayors

Travoltified: Omar and Cameron Gadbrooks

2. Terry Fator, Entertainer

Travoltified: Tommy Farster

3. Frank Marino, Female impersonator

Travoltified: Flynn Marftinez

4. Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, Magicians

Travoltified: Sameer Ferzguson and Ray Hernt

5. Wayne Newton, Singer

Travoltified: Wallace Nicheems

6. Guy Laliberte, Co-founder and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

Travoltified: Glenn Leeee

7. Billy Vassiliadis, CEO, R&R Partners

Travoltified: Brady Knight (with a hard K)

8. Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com

Travoltified: Teejay Hisckses

9. Jerry Tarkanian, Former UNLV basketball coach

Travoltified: Johnnie Thozomas

10. Andre Agassi, Professional tennis player

Travoltified: Ahmed Andrenson

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

ReviewJournal.com contributed to this story.