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!

November 15 - Ed Asner

Picture courtesy of wikia.com

On this day, in 1929, Yitzhak Edward Asner was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Ed graduated from Wyandotte High School in Kansas City and moved north for college, attending the University of Chicago. After a short stint working a factory job for General Motors, Ed joined the United States Army Signal Corps. It was during this time that he was bitten by the acting bug and appeared in several plays that toured around the Army camps in Europe entertaining the troops.

Upon leaving the military, Ed briefly joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago before moving to New York. He would occasionally return to the Windy City to appear with the successor to Playwrights, The Second City. In New York, Ed got roles in such off-Broadway shows as a revival of Threepenny Opera until 1960, when he made his on Broadway debut in Face of a Hero with Jack Lemmon. Hero ran for a total of 36 performances.

Picture grabbed from metv.com

Ed made his television debut in 1957 on CBS in an anthology series called Studio One. Throughout the rest of the Fifties and the Sixties, he would make guest appearances on a variety of shows. Sometimes it was sci-fi like The Invaders or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Sometimes it was dramas like Route 66 or Mr. Novak. Frequently it was other anthology shows like The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. 

Ed's days of bouncing from role to role took a break in 1970 when he landed a steady gig as Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. For the next seven years he gave Mary Richards hell for having too much spunk, winning three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy. When that show wrapped, Ed did something unprecedented in the history of television. His character received a spin-off titled Lou Grant, not that unusual except that the new show was an hour long drama instead of a half hour comedy. The unprecedented part is that Ed would go on to win two more Emmy Awards, this time for Lead Actor in a Drama. He became the first person to ever win Emmys for both comedy and drama playing the same character (in the forty years since only one other person has managed that feat, Uzo Aduba for Orange Is the New Black). Ed would later win two more Emmys, one for his role in Roots and another for his role in Rich Man, Poor Man making him the most decorated performer in Emmy history with seven total wins.

Picture stolen from fanpop.com

Ed is no stranger to the big screen either. One of his first films was an uncredited role in the 1962 Elvis Presley movie Kid Galahad. Dozens of other roles followed including parts in They Call Me Mr. Tibbs with Sidney Poitier, Fort Apache, The Bronx with Paul Newman and Oliver Stone's JFK. His most enduring film role is probably as Santa Clause in 2003's Christmas Classic Elf.

Ed has done a number of roles for the Walt Disney Company, mostly as voice work for animated characters. For those who remember the series Gargoyles, he was the voice of Hudson for 39 episodes. He voiced Evil Georgie in a 1994 episode of Dinosaurs and various voices for Recess, Hercules, and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. Ed made live action appearances in the 1976 movie Gus and and an episode of Disneyland. His biggest contribution to the Disney family was as one of my favorite characters of all time, Carl Fredricksen in 2009's Up. I wholeheartedly agree with the critic who felt a new Oscar category should have been created for Vocal Acting just so it could have been given to Ed.

Picture lifted from geeks.media

Outside of acting, Ed has been highly active in politics and charity work. He was a two term president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981-85. He endorsed Barack Obama for US President and regularly endorses candidates to lesser offices. He serves on the boards of The Survivor Mitzvah Project (providing aid to holocaust survivors in Europe), the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife and a non-profit school for kids with autism, Exceptional Minds (both his son and a grandson are autistic).