Age: 69
male
John Cardon Debney (born August 18, 1956) is an American composer and conductor of film, television, and video game scores. His work encompasses a variety of mediums and genres, including comedy, horror, science fiction, thriller, fantasy, and action-adventure. He is a long-time collaborator of The Walt Disney Company, having written music for their films, television series, and theme parks. He has also collaborated with film directors such as Jon Favreau, Garry Marshall, Tom Shadyac, Peter Hyams, John A. Davis, Brad Anderson, Howard Deutch, Mark Dindal, Robert Rodriguez, and Paul Tibbitt. Debney has been the recipient of three Primetime Emmy Awards and an Academy Award nomination for his score for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004). The son of Disney Studios producer Louis Debney (Zorro, The Mickey Mouse Club), John was born and raised in Glendale, California, nearby to Disney. He began guitar lessons at age six and played in rock bands in college. Debney earned his B.A. degree in Music Composition from the California Institute of Arts in 1979. After ending his career with Disney, Debney worked for Mike Post. Debney furthered his hands-on training by working with Hanna-Barbera composer Hoyt Curtin. After this, Debney went on to score television projects as diverse as Disneyland, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, SeaQuest DSV, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, The Cape, The Lazarus Man, Piggsburg Pigs!, The Further Adventures of SuperTed, Doctor Who, Cagney and Lacey, Tiny Toon Adventures, The Young Riders, The New Yogi Bear Show, Police Academy: The Animated Series, Fame, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Dragon's Lair, Freshman Dorm, Pop Quiz, and Dink, the Little Dinosaur, for which he won an Emmy for Best Main Title. In the early 1990s, Debney began to score indie films and Disneyland attractions. In 1991, Debney composed the music for Phantom Manor and It's a Small World (also used at Disneyland from 1993 to 2002) in Disneyland Paris and SpectroMagic at Magic Kingdom. In 1993, he scored his first studio feature, the Disney comedy Hocus Pocus starring Bette Midler. In 1994, Debney wrote Friends Forever with Greg Scelsa from Greg & Steve's album We All Live Together, Vol. 5. Debney has since gone on to have a career composing scores for many films, including Cats & Dogs, The Passion of the Christ, Bruce Almighty, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Elf, Sin City, Chicken Little, Liar Liar, Spy Kids, The Scorpion King, The Princess Diaries, and Predators. Debney has also composed scores for the video games Lair and The Sims Medieval. In 2010, he composed the theme music for the Nickelodeon television series Supah Ninjas. He composed some of Disney Parks's Nighttime Spectaculars, including World Of Colour Celebrate! in Disney's California Adventure, The Magic, The Memories And You! and Celebrate the Magic in Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom and Celebrate! Tokyo Disneyland in Tokyo Disneyland, as well as an arrangement of "When You Wish Upon a Star" as a fanfare for the Walt Disney Pictures logo from 1985 to 2006. Description above from the Wikipedia article John Debney, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
In the small town of Oakey Oaks, Chicken Little rings the school bell and warns everyone to run for their lives. This sends the whole town into a frenzy. Eventually, the Head of the Fire Department calms down enough to ask him what is happening. Chicken Little says that a piece of the sky shaped like a stop sign had fallen on his head, but he is unable to find the piece. His father, Buck Cluck, assumes that this "piece of sky" was just an acorn that had fallen from the tree, making Chicken Little the laughingstock of the town. A year later, Chicken Little remains ostracized and unhappy. Trying to help, his friend Abby Mallard encourages Chicken Little to talk to his father, but he really only wants to make his dad proud of him. As a result, he joins his school's baseball team in an attempt to recover his reputation and his father's pride, but is benched until the ninth inning of the last game, when he miraculously makes a home run and is hailed as a hero for winning the pennant. Later that night, he is hit on the head by the same "piece of the sky" — only to find out that it is not really a piece of the sky, but rather a device that blends into its surroundings. He calls his friends over to help figure out what the device is. When one of them pushes a button on the back of the hexagon, it flies into the sky and turns out to be part of the camouflage of an invisible UFO. Chicken Little manages to ring the bell to warn everyone, but the aliens see the crowds coming and escape, accidentally leaving behind a small orange alien. The town does not believe the story of the alien invasion and thinks it is a repeat of the acorn incident, and Chicken Little is ridiculed yet again. He and his friends discover the orange alien, and a few minutes later a whole fleet of alien ships descends on the town and start what appears to be an invasion. As the aliens rampage throughout Oakey Oaks, vaporizing everything in their path, Little realizes he must return the alien to its parents to save the planet. First, though, he confronts his father and regains his trust. In the invasion, Buck defends Little from the aliens until they are vaporized. It is then discovered that the aliens were not vaporizing people, but the ray guns teleported them aboard the UFO. The invasion was a misunderstanding, as the two aliens were looking for their lost child and attacked only out of concern. Little returns the child, and the aliens return everything to normal; as they depart they note a loose tile on their ship. Everyone is grateful for Chicken Little's efforts to save the town.
