August 18 - John Debney

Image courtesy johndebney.com

On this day, in 1956, John Cardon Debney was born in Glendale, California. John’s father, Louis, was a television producer for the Walt Disney Studio throughout his childhood. Louis was responsible for episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club, Zorro and the Disneyland anthology show. You name it and if it occurred during those early years, Louis had a hand in it. As a result, John did a whole lot of growing up on Disney soundstages and backlots. He also received the musical talent in his family, having started guitar lessons when he was just six years old. He also became proficient at a keyboard (the piano kind not the computer kind) and rotated through a number of bands right on into his college years. He was talented enough to get into the music program at CalArts and dedicated enough to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition in 1979. He then had to wait two whole weeks before starting a new job at the same place his father earned his living for so many years.

Image courtesy wikipedia.org

John started out at Disney about as low on the totem pole as you can get. He was in the copying department and was basically what they call a runner. He gathered up sheet music and recordings and ran them to wherever they needed to go. Until the day the Legendary composer Buddy Baker, who undoubtedly was aware of both John’s parentage and his musical degree, dropped a little project in his lap. Buddy needed someone to arrange some French classical music into a medley and if it could seamlessly repeat itself, that would be great. Could John accomplish that? Sure, no problem. Soon Buddy was bringing John all sorts of tasks like that. One week it might be German oompah bands, the next traditional Japanese melodies. It might sound like a bunch of eclectic busywork, but by the end of three years, John had arranged and composed a big chunk of the background music that was going to be heard continuously in the pavilions of the World Showcase area of Disney’s newest park, EPCOT Center. So the next time you find yourself drinking around the world, pause a moment in each country and enjoy some of John’s early work.

Image courtesy wikipedia.org

After three years of cutting his teeth with Disney, John was ready to cut himself loose and began freelancing as a composer of musical scores. He worked exclusively in television to begin with, collaborating with Mike Post, the legendary producer of series like Magnum, P.I., Quantum Leap and Hill Street Blues. He also dove into the madcap world of television animation with the Hanna-Barbera Studio apprenticing under their long-time musical director, Hoyt Curtin. During this period John wrote the scores for series as diverse as Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Young Riders (which earned him his first of three Emmy Awards for musical composition) and Dink, the Little Dinosaur.  As the Eighties turned into the Nineties, John began getting work writing scores for independent films, including two directed by Beau Bridges, The Wild Pair and Seven Hours to Judgement. Those projects led to his first studio film and the resurrection of a long relationship with the Walt Disney Company, for the second generation of Debneys.

Image copyright Disney

John returned to Disney in 1993 with the score for a little Halloween film that has since become a cult classic, Hocus Pocus. Since then he’s provided the music for all sorts of Disney films including White Fang 2, Houseguest, the Mickey Mouse short Runaway Brain, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, My Favorite Martian, Inspector Gadget, The Emperor’s New Groove (which nabbed an Annie Award nomination), The Princess Diaries (and its sequel), Snow Dogs, The Hot Chick, Raising Helen, The Pacifier, Chicken Little, Hannah Montana: The Movie, Old Dogs, Iron Man 2, and 2016’s live action remake of The Jungle Book.

Highlights of John’s work outside of Disney include several more collaborations with Garry Marshall (Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve) and John Favreau (Elf, Zathura: A Space Adventure). He nabbed his only Academy Award nomination so far for his work on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (he lost to Finding Neverland). He also picked up two more Emmy Awards, one for writing the main theme for SeaQuest DSV and another for scoring the pilot episode of The Cape. Currently you can hear John’s work on two television series, The Orville on Fox and Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix, as well as in movie theaters, if Dora and the Lost City of Gold is your thing. And of course, you can always take a stroll around World Showcase, where John’s music has been playing for over thirty years and will continue to underscore your Epcot adventures for many more to come. Happy 63^rd birthday John!