To Millions of Fans He Was Moochie. Disney Acting Legend Kevin Corcoran Has Passed Away at Age 66.

A boyhood friend of mine has passed away.

Oh, I never met him, but Moochie was a friend anyway. He'd come to our little farm house a lot, whether it was on 'The Mickey Mouse Club' or one of the many Disney movies he was in, like 'Toby Tyler'. The movie I remember him in most was the classic 'Old Yeller'. To this day, I can't watch the movie without getting a lump in my throat...and a smile on my face. The scene near the end of the movie when it's time to bring Old Yeller's life to an end? Well, check it out for yourself.

According to the New York Times, Moochie...oops, I mean Kevin Corcoran, passed away this week at the age of 66.

Kevin Corcoran, a child actor for Walt Disney in the 1950s and ’60s who appeared in films like “Old Yeller” before moving behind the camera to work in production, died on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 66.

The cause was colorectal cancer, his niece Karnel Watkins said.

Known as Moochie (a nickname supposedly bestowed by Walt Disney himself) during much of his performing career, Mr. Corcoran began acting soon after he could walk.

He was first called Moochie in 1956 on “Adventures in Dairyland,” a serial shown on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” and went by that name in films like “The Shaggy Dog” (1959) and other Disney serials, including “Moochie of Pop Warner Football” and “Moochie of the Little League.”

Mr. Corcoran also played characters not named Moochie in three family-oriented films released in 1960: “Pollyanna,” with Hayley Mills and Jane Wyman; “Swiss Family Robinson,” with John Mills and Dorothy McGuire; and “Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks With a Circus,” with James Drury and a chimpanzee.

Three years earlier he had made audiences sob in “Old Yeller,” the coming-of-age story of two farm boys (Mr. Corcoran and his fellow Disney child star Tommy Kirk) whose beloved dog becomes rabid; Fess Parker played their father. Mr. Corcoran and Mr. Kirk reprised their roles in a sequel, “Savage Sam” (1963).