Louis Debney, Veteran Producer for Walt Disney, Dead at 70

Louis Debney, who began a long affiliation with Walt Disney when he sold the famed animator newspapers as a boy and then went on to produce 100 episodes of the “Mickey Mouse Club” and 80 episodes of “Zorro” for television, is dead.

Debney died Tuesday at Glendale Adventist Hospital. He was 70 and his death was attributed to a heart attack.

Debney was 14 and selling newspapers outside the old Disney Studios near Vermont and Kingswell avenues in the Silver Lake district. Three years later he had gone to work for Walt Disney as a cutter and soon was put in charge of the assembly operation for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937.

He also had been an assistant director on “Two Gun Mickey,” the studio’s last black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoon released in 1934, and later was production manager for “Perri,” a 1957 nature fantasy.

In the late 1950s Debney produced the “Mickey Mouse Club” and “Zorro” episodes. In the 1960s and ‘70s he worked on several other TV shows, including “The Mouse Factory” and several feature and educational division films. He then became coordinator of the long-running series, “The Wonderful World of Disney.”

He is survived by his wife, Edith, son, John and two grandchildren.