Once upon a time on television from 1995 to 1997, my toddler children time traveled with a Jack Russell Terrier named Wishbone.
Well-read in the classics, Wishbone saw every dramatic event in his family’s life paralleled with a famous tail tale.
As Wishbone retells the classic story of the day, he imagines his life in the role of the leading dog man while wearing a stunning costume!
This award-winning television series about Wishbone helped me introduce my pre-school aged children to the world of classical literature.
Great Booklist from Wishbone
My toddlers joyfully came to know the overarching themes of many of the Great Books, such as:
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Oliver Twist
- Romeo and Juliet
- The Odyssey
- Cyrano de Bergerac
- Hound of the Baskervilles
- Rip van Winkle
- Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
- Don Quixote
- Faust
- Ivanhoe
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Silas Marner
- A Tale of Two Cities
- Frankenstein
- Journey to the Center of the Earth
- One Thousand and One Nights
- Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- The Purloined Letter
- The Time Machine
- The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
- Pride and Prejudice
- The Pauper and the Prince
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Treasure Island
- David and Goliath
- The Red Badge of Courage
- The Tempest
- The Three Musketeers
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
- Henry IV, Part I
- Great Expectations
- The Courtship of Miles Standish
- Northanger Abbey
- The Aeneid
Our Wishbone Merchandise Collection
Then one day in December while shopping in Dallas I found Wishbone merchandise! Oooo, it was a great Christmas gift shopping day. I scored lots of mom points that year!
I bought two stuffed Wishbones, one for my son…and one for me to use in our homeschool classroom! I bought three of the stuffed Wishbone costumes which easily secure with velcro: Romeo, Robin Hood, and Ichabod Crane.
And I found a card game (like Hearts) but with imagery featuring Wishbone in various characters from the classics. So many variations can be played, from simple games like my kids did when they were toddlers (mere matching into sets) to the more complex game of Hearts when they grew older.
Then I found the book versions of the tv show which we read together.
Alas, woe is me…where are they now? I haven’t seen them since my kids moved out, but I’m especially missing my stuffed Wishbone with all the costumes to use in my sewing room for my blogging.
Spreading the Wishbone News to Other Dog Lovers
During the time the show aired, my kids were seeing an occupational therapist whose therapy dog, Luke, helped the kids. During each therapy session my kids told the therapist about the latest episodes of Wishbone we had seen! Soon she got hooked on the show too.
We were Fellow Texans
We felt a deep kinship with the show because it was both taped and set in a small town north of Dallas, Texas. And most of the actors were Texans. (At the time we were living at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas, about an hour and a half northwest of there.)
Personally Meeting the Cast
One day Wishbone and his voice actor, Larry Brantley, were scheduled to come to a bookstore near us in Wichita Falls.
Sadly, both the little dog and the voice actor were under the weather, but someone equally wonderful came instead: Joe Talbot arrived with a big smile!
Jordan Wall, a high schooler who portrayed Joe Talbot, Wishbone’s teenage boy, clearly had fun with all the children who sat enrapt with every word he shared. I was really impressed.
Even though he totally exuded being super cool and hip, both in real life and tv, he was also totally absorbed and down to earth with his very young audience.
He signed a book for each of my kids and gave them this picture of him and Wishbone.
Epilogue 2018
By the time my kids tackled many of these classics in their more adult form in the Rhetoric years, they remembered their lessons from Wishbone, a dog with a big imagination.
Then came the college years.
Although my son attended Patrick Henry College which embraces the classics, my daughter attended the local junior college in Northern Virginia (where we now live) followed by George Mason University’s accelerated program where most literature professors avoided the classics like the plague.
My determined Wishbone-inspired daughter worked the classics into every single project she possibly could, and even wore some of our old homeschool costumes for her presentations!
Oh, yea, did I forget to mention that? My old blog (where the underlying platform has removed tech support from which I’m currently importing old blog posts to refresh) made us world famous as we homeschooled in costumes from each of the historical eras.
After we moved to Virginia from Texas in 2009, we went to Colonial Williamsburg all the time! Thomas Jefferson used to tease us: Have you moved in to the historic area, yet?
At the urging of my kids, who wanted historically accurate attire to wear on our CW visits, I took lots of sewing classes from the tailors and mantua makers of Colonial Williamsburg. Thus my specialty is 18th century historical sewing. (And for the record, I’m still learning and practicing my stitches!)
Anyway all of my daughter’s classmates wanted to be in her group. They were like: You were homeschooled? You got to read the classics? We’re jealous.
One day on campus, my daughter was walking behind a couple of girls chatting about the imagined possibility of someone coming to life from a history book. On cue my daughter breezed past them in her 18th century cloak! Wishbone would have loved it!
Epilogue 2022, Texas Monthly interview of the enduring world-wide legacy of Wishbone
Here is a fantastic in-depth article from the October 2022 issue of Texas Monthly that shares the scoop on how this amazing series about a dog’s life with the classics was conceived, produced, and set records.
Quoted from the article a synopsis of the production:
There wasn’t anything on television quite like Wishbone at the time. It was blessed with deep pockets for elaborate set designs and costumes. And the show took its young viewers seriously. Anchored by writing that didn’t coddle, Wishbone introduced kids to complex characters and themes while still being lighthearted (and, yes, adorable). During its short two-season run, the series—helmed by a Dallas-based crew and numerous Texas thespians—earned a Peabody Award and four Daytime Emmys.
Quoted from the article is the interview from those who worked on the show which tells the short story of how it all came together…ultimately proving the value of the Classics:
Rick Duffield (creator/executive producer): He could do a backflip! It was like, “Are you kidding me?” And he had this look. It was a calm, almost Zen look. He was perfect.
Betty Buckley (producer): We created a company of actors called the Wishbone Players…And people were just excited. I don’t think you get that in the bigger markets, where people are a little jaded and it’s about the paycheck.
Stephanie Simpson (showrunner/head writer): It was like a graduate program in literature just to write the show, which was incredible. We all learned more about writing and storytelling from doing that over and over again week after week than we could have learned in ten years of a classroom education.
Stephanie Simpson: The biggest challenge was keeping up the pace with our schedule: reading a four-hundred-page book in one night and then trying to figure out what the story was for the dog and another for the kids.
Rick Duffield: “…PBS wants forty episodes. And they need ’em by next year.” And I went, “Whoa.” I’m thinking, “Well, there’s 52 weeks in a year. Maybe we can do this.”… The cast and crew were expecting to wrap at the end of the week, but instead we had a big celebration.
Betty Buckley: It was like a huge, fun working family. Everyone had this attitude, like, “Send me in, coach.” That Texas can-do attitude played a huge role in that.
Caris Turpen (visual effects supervisor): We had film professionals from across the world calling the studio and saying, “When did you go to England? When did you go to Greece? We didn’t know that you traveled.” And they were told, “No, that was all a digital composite.”
Larry Brantley (voice talent for Wishbone): Well, the head of security for Mall of America walks in, and he goes, “You guys have officially surpassed the attendance of the opening of Planet Hollywood here.” The room got quiet, and I said, “How many people were at the Planet Hollywood opening?” He goes, “Five thousand.” And I said, “At the risk of having Jackie snatch up the dog and run out of here, how many people are roughly out there?” He goes, “About seven.”
Rick Duffield: We had this tiny window…a few years later, that window closed. The money for children’s television dried up. The thing is that in the ensuing years from its first broadcast, this show went into over seventy territories around the world. So the broadcast revenue kept coming for years...At the end of the day, it actually made it up, that $20 million.
Larry Brantley: I know for a fact that I could have retired on that one show. We were never going to run out of source material—ever. I remember we were hanging out on set one day, and I thought, “If I did nothing else for the rest of my career and just did this, I’m pretty sure I’d be okay with it. Because I would be challenged by a new story every week.”
Rick Duffield: It was the most fun I’ve ever had working in my life, and after it was over I kind of withdrew from it for a long time. It was hard. But these Zoom calls now, they’re healing me because we’re all reliving the joy of it. Every time I talk to them, it just lifts my spirits. Joe Nemmers [one of the main Wishbone players] was on one of these calls recently, and he said, “You know who the star of the show was? The book.” And that’s true. Everybody understood that’s why we were there. We were in service to the book.
Larry Brantley: The values in Wishbone are universal. That’s why they exist across literature that spans mythology to folklore to early twentieth-century literature. Every single culture down through time has created stories to cope. The beating heart of that show was simply trying to pass that along. The most poignant and pertinent question that anyone has ever asked me is “What’s your story?”
What’s the story Wishbone, of our homeschool?
So, what is the story of our own homeschool? In short, we pursued a classical education…and costumes! Although I usually credit Colonial Williamsburg for this, perhaps it was Wishbone who expanded our imaginations and left us this legacy.
Refreshing this very old and simple blog post caused me to deep diving into telling more of the story for my new blog, which brought back old memories.
Stay tuned for more of our journey with classics, costumes, and adventure!
