Ariana Grande and John Legend will record the title song for Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, Billboard reports. The song, written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, was first recorded by Angela Lansbury in character as an anthropomorphic teapot, a role that will be assumed by Emma Thompson in the remake. But the most famous version was Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson’s, which played over the end credits of the 1991 animated film and made it to No. 9 on the Billboard charts.
Its success as a single kicked off the era of completely inescapable adult contemporary Disney recordings, which lasted the rest of the decade. The first No. 1 hit came with Disney’s very next film, as Regina Belle and, well, Peabo Bryson again, sang “A Whole New World (Aladdin’s Theme),” aka “The Song That Finally Knocked ‘I Will Always Love You’ Off the Top of the Billboard Charts.”
From there, Disney was off to the races, treating audiences to Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” from The Lion King, an All-4-One recording of “Someday,” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Michael Bolton’s version of “Go the Distance” from Hercules, and, of course, Christina Aguilera’s very first single, “Reflection,” from Mulan:
It was a dark age of overproduced, unlistenable sludge but also a golden age of ancillary revenue for the Walt Disney Co., so naturally it’s coming back around. Talk about a tale as old as time.
