December 4, 2024 • 37 mins
This week marks 8 years since the finale of the beloved series "Wishbone". In the 1990s, PBS introduced young audiences to a canine star like none other: a Jack Russell terrier who imagined himself as characters from classic works of literature. The show was called Wishbone. Today there's a whole generation of adults who were first weaned on Mark Twain, the legend of Faust or the Greek epics through this series. Wishbone is also the first TV show Mo wrote for. Mo talks with Wishbone head writer Stephanie Simpson and dog trainer Jackie Kaptan about the show and the life and career of its beloved lead actor, a dog named Soccer.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Because of your extraordinary bravery and intelligence, you have earned
the titles of Honorary Corporal Rusty and Honorary Private Rint Tintin.
Ever since Rin Tin Tin, the superstar German shepherd who
on screen rescued plenty of people and off screen, rescued
Warner Brothers from bankruptcy in the nineteen twenties, dogs have
(00:23):
played leading roles in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Look there's Tuto, where do you come from from?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Kansas's most courageous Cairn.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Terrier Who's come to take us to dog?
Speaker 1 (00:36):
To the collie who seemed to save more people in
the nineteen fifties than the polio vaccine did. To the
Golden retriever who held court in the air Bud movies,
Doots Don't played basketball?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Was the matter?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Gentlemen?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Afraid your team might get beat by a dog?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
But I'm not sure any dog has ever played a
role as multifaceted as the one played by the Jack
Russell terrier, who starred in the nineteen nineties PBS television
series Wishbone.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Believe me it was.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Nothing, Hey, whishbird, Let's have some meat.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Look?
Speaker 6 (01:16):
Did I hear you say?
Speaker 7 (01:17):
Me?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Love?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
That dog's real name was soccer now as Wishbone, he
didn't just beg for treats.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
Soccer was a total action hero dog. Soccer was winning
battles and getting knighted and solving mysteries.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Look closely, the clues could be anywhere.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
No one is above suspicion. Wishbone, it turns out, had
a rich fantasy life. In each episode, he imagined himself
as the hero in a different work of classic literature.
Viewers at home saw him leading a merry band of
outlaws against the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Speaker 6 (01:58):
Robin Hood actual of us.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
So romancing like Shakespeare's Romeo.
Speaker 8 (02:05):
With Love's like wings, did I or perch these walls?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And inspired by Jules Vern digging deep, going where no
dog or man had gone before, proof.
Speaker 8 (02:17):
That we are on the right track, on one to
the Sun, God of the Eye.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
For the show's target audience of six to eleven year olds,
Soccer became a tween idol.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I have pictures of people waiting in line two blocks
long just to see this dog.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
What's the story, Wishbone? What's this?
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Your dreaming?
Speaker 9 (02:42):
Enough such?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Today there's a whole pack of grown ups out there
who were first winged on Mark Twain or the Legend
of Faust, or the Greek epics through Wishbone.
Speaker 9 (02:55):
I remember, like on my tenth birthday, I think it
was we were gonna go mini golfing and I insisted,
but we had to stay home for Wishbone first, and as.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
A twenty five year old a mere puff myself, I
got to write for Wishbone. I've told people that writing
for the show was like an assignment from an English
professor on assets.
Speaker 6 (03:13):
It totally was.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
So much went into this show to make it a hit,
but none of it would have worked without the top dog.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
I think every movie star has eyes that tell stories,
and Soccer had the most amazing dog eyes.
Speaker 7 (03:35):
He was a magic little creature man, he really was.
He looked so good on camera.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
I shouldn't say this, so he wasn't the smartest dog
I've ever turned, but he was so devoted once he
learned it. He would walk on water for me. He
just loved to be out with me working. To him,
it wasn't work.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Morocca and this
is mobituaries, This mobid Wishbone. June twenty sixth, two thousand
and one. Death of a working dog. All right, So
(04:18):
what was Wishbone about. Well, let's have some fans who
grew up with the show explain.
Speaker 9 (04:25):
So it was called Wishbone, and it was this little dog,
Jack Russell Terrier.
Speaker 8 (04:31):
Wishbone has a love for classic literature.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
And then he would like magically transport himself into stories.
Wishbone is a children's television show that aired on PBS's
the nineteen nineties, and it is the only.
Speaker 6 (04:43):
Reason why I ever passed in English class because I
did not do the reading.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Okay, now my turn. The show was about a dog
named Wishbone who lived in a town called Oakdale. Wishbone
would get into all sorts of adventures with his owner,
a boy named Joe, and the other neighbor hood kids,
and those adventures would remind Wishbone of stay with me
here stories from classic literature. It could be a novel
(05:09):
like Treasure Island, and epic poem like Homer's Odyssey in
African folk tale like Anansi the Spider.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Wishbone read a lot.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
He didn't waste time watching TV, just go with it,
and so each episode alternated between Wishbone living his regular
life in Oakdale and his fantasy life as the hero
of classic literature. Twin plots thematically connected more about his
fantasy life later. Basically, Wishbone the show was all about story,
(05:37):
but the story of the dog who played Wishbone begins
with an animal trainer named Jackie Captain. Hello Jackie, Yes,
it's Moe.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Oh my goodnessistant so long.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It's been more than twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Jackie's been living off the grid way up in Haynes, Alaska.
You're not easy to get a hold of.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, that's the reason I came up here. No, I
retired eight years ago. It's beautiful up here. Good fishing
bears walked through my property.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Do you think the bears know your background with animals
and that they kind of respect it?
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Well, I've kind of told them, Look, we're on common
ground here. You leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Jackie actually began her career in motion pictures working with
wild animals, including bears, but she learned much of what
she knows about training dogs from famed Hollywood trainer Frank Ann.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
I went to work for him, and that was probably
the best experience I had learning how to do dogs
for motion picture.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Frank Inn worked on Lassie, I Love Lucy. He trained
Audrey Hepburn's orange tabby cat in Breakfast to Tiffany's. He
wrangled all five hundred of the animals comprising LIMEE. Clampitt's
cast of critters on the Beverly Hillbillies. Critters will new
things for that girl, wouldn't do for nobody else. Here
he is training the lovable mutt who's starred in the
(07:13):
Benji movies.
Speaker 8 (07:15):
Come on, nudget, Benji, Please, come on, come on, nudget, nudget.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Good kid, Look here, feet up, stay a spe And.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
He just was this larger than life character, big man
with a big hand of our mustache and a captain's hat.
And you just couldn't forget him if he ever saw
him work a dog.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Frank Inn helped Jackie launch her own career. She worked
on the nineteen eighty three horror movie Kujojo about a
rabbit Saint Bernard Kuser, which manner, and she helped Ethan
Hawke bond with a surly wolfhound in White Fang.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Just wanted to pet him.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
White Fang was shot up in Haines, Alaska. Jackie says
she you then that one day she'd retire. There have
you got any dogs up there.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
I only have one dog left, which is really weird
for me. I have the Beverly Hills Chihuahua Rosa.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Oh my gosh, and remember Rosa. There's nothing wrong with
being different.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Different.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It is just a nice way of saying run.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah. She's twelve now, she only weighs three pounds.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
She's the Beverly Hills Chihuaba and she's living in Haines, Alaska,
surrounded by grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
How's that working out?
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Well, she doesn't go out much, I mean, because everything
wants to get her, the eagles, I mean, you know,
so she pretty much just stays in the cabin.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
But Jackie, I know you're retired, but this just screams
out for a Beverly Hills Chihuaba sequel, I mean, escape
to Alaska.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
I know it does, doesn't it. I like that idea.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Jackie met the dog who would one day play Wishbone
back in nineteen eighty eight in Connecticut when he was
just a week old, and.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I said, that is the cutest pubby I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Jackie took him home that very day and named him Soccer.
But because of Soccer's markings, brown patches around his left
eye and right ear. Casting directors thought he looked too
much like the Little Rascals dog Pete. Pretty soon it
seemed clear Soccer's acting career was going nowhere.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah, he didn't do much at all until he did
Wishbone and he was six or seven.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I think six or seven in dog years.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
You do the math.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
He was getting up there has been without ever having.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Been my husband. And all my friends were like, really, Jaggy,
why do you spend so much time training on this dog.
I like this dog. He's my buddy. I don't care
if he ever works. I like this dog. And they'd
all laugh at man. I'm telling you, one day, this
dog is going to get what he deserves.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
In nineteen ninety three, auditions for the lead role in
Wishbone were announced, Butackie was tied up on another project.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
I was in Montana working on River Wild.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
And she wasn't particularly interested.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I'm tied up on a feature movie.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Here, you know, sidebar. I loved the River Wild, an
action adventure starring a buff Meryl Streep opposite an evil
Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 6 (10:20):
Woo woo woo.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
You the dog expended who right, now who, I think I'll.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Go oh oo oo oo.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
The dog who.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
But the Wishbone team liked Soccer's look and prevailed on
Jackie to bring him in for an audition, and Soccer
wowed them.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
He wasn't just charming, he.
Speaker 5 (10:43):
Pulled off all of his tricks with the cool, confidence,
even cockiness of a jung Claude van Dam. He sealed
the deal with a backflip, which you can see in
the show's opening credits. Now, Jackie could get Soccer to
do a lot, but she couldn't make him.
Speaker 7 (10:59):
Actually, when I first was asked to audition to be
the voice of Wishbone, I had no idea what the
show was.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
That became the job of stand up comic and voiceover
actor Larry Brantley.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
And I've done this my whole life with animals. I
watch an animal and I think I know what they're thinking.
I don't know why I think that, but I'm just
I'm convinced I know what's going on in that tiny
little head, and I'm pretty good at verbalizing it.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Wishbone had his voice, and so in the summer of
nineteen ninety four, trainer Jackie Captain packed her bags and
Soccer for the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, where Wishbone would
be filmed. I know, Texas in the summer. It's not pretty.
But any skepticism Jackie might have felt had melted away.
She was now sold on the idea of the show.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
You know, this could be the last thing that I do,
and it seems like it's important. It's educationalal for children,
it'll get them to read again. And it would just
hit me, it drew me, and it was like this
little dog could really bring this alive. Of course, Soccer
(12:09):
would never go with anybody else. He'd always been.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
With me, so you had to be there.
Speaker 10 (12:13):
Well.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I mean, he was a great little dog, but he
had a soft side to him. And if I wasn't there,
I don't know that he would have danced the jig
like he did.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
And in fact, he did dance jigs. I mean he
did kind of every behavior.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Really.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Oh, there was times when we do production meetings that
I'd take really, folks in my head, he doesn't have thumbs.
I don't know how he's going to shoot a bow
and arrow. It was like, oh, my goodness, who wrote this?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Well?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
I was one of the people who wrote for Wishbone,
and writing for this dog would end up being one
of the most formative experiences of my life.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Did you ever think you'd end up writing for a dog?
Speaker 7 (12:58):
No?
Speaker 6 (12:58):
I didn't, No, I did not.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
That's my friend Stephanie Simpson. She was Wishbone's supervising producer,
story editor, and head writer.
Speaker 6 (13:10):
However, in the early days, when I was trying to
figure out how to do it, I remembered that I
had always made up dialogue and sort of monologues for
our cat, and so in thinking about Wishbone, I don't know,
it just seemed natural. Suddenly, I have to say, to
write Wishbone someone's pet as having this very rich inner
(13:33):
life that you were not aware of.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Over my career, I've been fortunate to work for a
few people who put everything they humanly could into making
something good, who wouldn't let up until it was as
right as it could be. But Stephanie has been singular
in my life. She taught me more than anyone how
to tell a story. If Soccer had Jackie, I had Stephanie.
(14:00):
Sephanie had majored in Russian literature at Yale and earned
a Masters in drama at Harvard. She was perfectly trained
for this bizarre task. Of course, she couldn't do it alone.
And that's when I got the call. At the time,
I was in a production of South Pacific at New
Jersey's paper Mill Playhouse.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
We got volleyball, any games we got.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Stephanie brought me down to Dallas to interview with Wishbone
executive producer Rick Duffield, who hired me as a staff writer.
I began working with Stephanie in what felt like a
storytelling boot camp. Now, as I explained earlier, each episode
(14:48):
of the show connected a modern day storyline in the
fictional town of Oakdale to a different work of classic literature.
Here's Wishbone as Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Who is her mother?
Speaker 10 (15:01):
Her mother is the lady of the house?
Speaker 6 (15:04):
Oh, Lady of the Ooh is she a capulate?
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Who is that gentleman? His name is Romeo?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Now in the contemporary plot line for that episode, one
of the neighborhood kids, Samantha, falls in love with a
beagle named Rosie at the local pound and wants to
adopt her. Would you're dad that.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
You have a go if you sell this dog?
Speaker 4 (15:26):
He couldn't say no.
Speaker 6 (15:27):
The contemporary world was a way to show that there
were themes and ideas in these in these great books
that could be translated into a kid's life. So you
could fall in love with the dog at the pound,
and suddenly that could be the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Now there wasn't going to be a suicide in the
(15:47):
contemporary story as there is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
But there could be heartbreak. There could be a dog
is adopted before you are able to adopt it.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Sam. Sorry, I know how much you liked Rosie.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
And so you have to deal with some kind of loss.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
I'm glad she's okay.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I mean, she really needed to get home.
Speaker 10 (16:10):
For me.
Speaker 6 (16:11):
The exciting thing was trying to match the thread to
what I thought would capture a kid's imagination and also
their hearts. What would they care the most about?
Speaker 1 (16:22):
And it never occurred to you that an episode should
with all due respect, because I have nothing against Cliff's notes,
and they pronounced Cliff's notes, and for somebody who has trouble.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
With essays, it's a lot of essays.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
But anyway, but because it could have been in other hands,
it would have been Okay, we're going to do the
totality of this book in the half hour.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
No, that never Actually, I never felt pressure to do that.
What I felt pressure to do was to get someone
to fall in love with the idea.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Of the book. The idea of the book.
Speaker 6 (16:57):
The idea of the book, not the plot, the lot
of the because there's only so many plots in the world.
Plot really, to me, in a book is not the point.
The point is how the author has taken a set
of events and made them mean something different than they've
ever met before because of who exactly is doing them
(17:17):
and why they're doing them.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
If LeVar Burton's show Reading Rainbow was teaching kids how
to read, Wishbone was showing kids why great books matter.
Speaker 6 (17:28):
And to me, it's not like the authors of these
books never wrote them so that the books themselves would
be kind of locked away from everyday people. I mean
no offense to literature majors, but I think it would
be very disappointing for Savantes to find out that only
a small group of select students at a university we're
(17:53):
reading don Quixote. That would be super sad for him.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
That's a work that's so sprawling, many ideas there.
Speaker 6 (18:01):
Its like so long to read it, mo, and I had,
you know, maybe three days.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Servante's's Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is about
an idealistic man chasing the impossible dream of becoming a knight.
In the Wishbone version, Joe chases a long shot of
his own eighty.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Six consecutive free throws in five minutes. That's all I
need to hold the record for any kid. N there's sixteen.
Then i'd be in the Encyclopedia of World Records.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Do you really think it's possible.
Speaker 6 (18:37):
Sure, Joe was trying to make a certain number of
baskets and he was having trouble. He would get nervous
and choke. He imagined that his life would be amazing
if he could just achieve this one great thing, and
in the end he doesn't achieve it.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
You were great, but I didn't do the impossible.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I'm not going down in history or anything.
Speaker 4 (19:04):
I'm not extraordinary. Hey, you don't have to perform impossible
feats to be extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Just live your life. Life is an ongoing adventure.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
But it was the act of trying that matters.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I've told people that writing for the show was like
an assignment from an English professor on Assey.
Speaker 6 (19:25):
It totally was Yes, you are so right, that's a
perfect way to describe it. And what's so funny mo
is looking back on it, I realized how crazy it was,
but at the time when we were doing it, I
didn't think it was that crazy, and it didn't seem
nuts until later.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
To pull this nutty premise off, we had to stick
to some hard and fast rules. For example, yes, Wishbone talks,
thanks to Larry Brantley, but human characters in Wishbone's life
in Oakdale don't hear him. Only the lucky viewers hear
what he's thinking. But when Wishbone is imagining himself as
a character in a book, he's acting opposite human actors
(20:03):
who can hear him.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Mister Darcy, we should be a darling and escorted me
to the punch bow.
Speaker 5 (20:08):
Yes, of course, excuse us, miss Mega the minute.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Part of what was so what was so well immediately
funny was that in the fantasy sequences that Wishbone was
treated as a human.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
I imagine really that Wishbone was a kid. It was
a stand in for a kid who when they act
out stories and they're the star of the movie or
the comic book in their imaginations, or when they're playing
it out with their friends, nobody stops and goes, well,
you're a kid doing this. You're a kid, not a king.
(20:43):
It's funnier that the dog just takes it for granted
that he's doing it and this is his imagination, and
everyone will treat him in his imagination the way he
would expect to be treated.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
People love the show so much, you know.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
It makes me so happy. And one of my goals
and one of the things I think I said to
you and to the whole crew and we were starting,
is we have an opportunity to be the first people
to introduce these stories and images into a child's imagination.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
And I had to tell you also, Stephanie. You know,
for all these years since the project, anything I've tried
to do, I end up going back to wish Phone
and what I learned from you and working on that,
and you know, jack to make me grow well now,
but Jackie, you know, talking about training wish Phone, I thought,
(21:40):
I know, this is a weird way to put it,
but it was like Stephanie trained me really because I
came into it and you know it was I realized
I didn't know what I was doing at first, and
I am so grateful to you for I'm getting emotional,
but I'm so grateful.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Thank you.
Speaker 7 (21:58):
Mo.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Well, I'm I'm so grateful to hear you say that,
because I was under a lot of pressure and it
was difficult.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Sometimes it's scary, right, I don't think I don't know
that you were scared. I was scared at first, and
then you gave me, you gave me the courage to
do it.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (22:19):
I think also that for me, I loved each of
these books so much. This is going to sound corny,
but for me, the joy of it, even though it
was also scary. The thing that over helped me overcome
any fear that I had was once I actually now
(22:40):
I'm going to get emotional.
Speaker 10 (22:45):
Once I actually read the book and fell in love
with it, it seemed like not an easy thing, but
an important thing to transmit that to someone else, to
share that with somebody else, And that was what helped
me overcome the fear of doing it. Was actually the
(23:07):
sheer love of the story and the belief that other
people needed to fall in love with it too.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
There's that proverb it's always darkest before the dawn. That's
certainly my experience with writing the darkness part. Stephanie taught
me by example how important it is not to give
up and how satisfying it is to come out the
other side.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Wish Mode is.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Where I learned not to despair in creating something because
it's like, oh my god, it's really looking dire right now,
it's really looking dire. But this is the project where
I learned that it's at that point that you just
keep pushing through and.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
You're going to get there.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
That's where the leap will happen.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
I still remember how I felt finishing the first episode
I wrote for Wishbone, based on HG. Wells's The Time.
Speaker 8 (23:57):
Machine System destination on Time on New In case of emergency,
keep your heads and arms inside the vehicle, oh stop.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
I remember finishing, and I stayed up all night on
New Year's Eve nineteen ninety four, and it was my
best New Year's Eve ever finishing that script, and it
kind of locking into place quite literally at dawn on
New Year's Day nineteen ninety five, and that felt so
(24:32):
and so I like my New Year's Eves to be
promising and not frivolous to be.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
Epic creation moments of creations. I love it. I also
think it's so fitting that you were writing the time
Machine as the year turned over. That is kind of perfect.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
How will you remember Soccer? Oh?
Speaker 6 (24:55):
I will always remember Soccer as the dog who made
what I imagined in my head even better than I
had imagined it. I really will. I thought, how will
this ever actually happen? How will we ever actually do this?
And then once I saw Soccer on screen, I felt
(25:19):
this relief that this was going to work and it
was going to be even better than I thought it
could be. And that's how I will remember Soccer and
be grateful to Soccer always for that.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Be grateful to him.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
I am grateful to him and his beautiful brown eyes.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Wishbone wasn't just the best red dog on TV. He
was also the best dressed. I mean, this dog was
a total clothes horse. Just his hats alone. There was
the top hat for when he played Doctor Jekyl and
mister Hyde. The adorable straw hat he wore is Tom
Sawyer the Bycocking. That's the name of that cute little
(26:00):
hattie sported as Robinhood Wishbone. Superfans like Claire Conley vividly
recall his costumes. There was an episode where it was
The Tempest and he was aerial and had this sort
of like flowy costume that was really cute that I
liked a lot. Trust me, you'll want to look up
Wishbone's Tempest to wardrobe. We're talking Liberachi level over the top.
(26:23):
Costume designer Stephen Chewedadge and his team dressed an entire
cast in a different period specific wardrobe each episode, head
to toe or head to tail in the case of
our star. Chewed Edge talked to Entertainment Tonight in nineteen
ninety five.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
The challenge is sizing down human clothes and making them
actually fit a dog.
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Dogs have a different anatomy than than humans, as is obvious, and.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Of course too, we have to we have to make
things that he will wear well.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
For Ivanhoe, he was wearing chain mail. Dogs don't wear
chain mail ordinarily.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Well, they don't wear pants either.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
That's soccer's trainer, Jackie Captain again, Mark Twain.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Remember he had pants and we'd all laugh, you know,
I'd never had him backflip with pants. Yeah, he kind
of looked at me like, really, yeah, you can do it,
It's okay. So that took a few days for him
to get used to the pants.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Of course, it wasn't just that backflip you saw on
the opening credits. Soccer had to learn all sorts of
new tricks and performed them in costume. Jackie trained him
to belly crawl through the fog of war in the
Red Patch of Courage episode, she trained him to pull
the lever on the time machine.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
I think when we went there we had like fifteen behaviors,
different tricks, and by the time we finished Wishbone, he
had like forty tricks. I was like, how many tricks
can one little dog store in his little brain? But
he was so devoted once he learned it. He would
(28:05):
walk on water for me.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Well you say he'd walk on water for you. But
to be fair, he didn't really like water, did he.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
No, he didn't.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Okay, it's a bit I don't like water.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Most of the water work.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Including an epic scene from the Odyssey episode, was handled
by a stunt dog named Phoebe Daily. Yes, there were
other dogs.
Speaker 6 (28:34):
Phoebe was amazing, and Phoebe was fearless right, she was
Hammler to Linda Hamilton, Phoebe could leap off of things,
she could swim lap, she I think sat on a horse.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
At one point there was another stunt double. And I
say this affectionately, but this dog had a face for radio.
I mean, this was a dog that I remember looking
a little Jimmy Duranty like. Is that a fair way
of characterizing Slugger or my being unfair?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Oh, Slugger, he was so cute. He's such a sweet dog.
I forgot about Slugger.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Sorry, Slugger, but rest assured. Soccer was in almost every scene.
Speaker 6 (29:16):
But what's interesting about the other dogs is that none
of them were close up dogs. It was still Soccer
who was the star. The wishbone, those markings, those eyes,
and one other thing I can say about Soccer's acting
was his ability to look focused. Soccer's look at the
(29:37):
other actor appeared as if he really was taking in
what they were saying.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
I remember on set after the director called action, often
the only other voice you'd hear was Jackie's speaking directly
to her dog.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
When I was just working him on the set, my
voice would be just kind of normal. I rehearse him
to something Gomark day. Good. But then when we were
done and he did exactly what I wanted, I wanted
him to know that that was correct, and I'd go
good for you good, and you could see that he'd
be like, yes, I get it, and that means a
(30:15):
lot to them. Or when we were doing backflip, that's
a really hard behavior, and I'd always go ready, ready,
and that kind of geared him up to what we
were doing.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Ready flip. The show debuted on October ninth, nineteen ninety five,
and soon developed a with all due respect to Kujo
rapid following.
Speaker 8 (30:37):
As you know, Wishbone is the star of the mega.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
Popular, award winning children's show on PBS Design to introduce
kids to literature.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I give you once again the Wishbone super fans.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
What more could you ask for?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
It's the perfect kid show. You got a cute dog,
you got education.
Speaker 9 (30:55):
I remember my first exposure to like William Shakespeare was
from this frickin' dog. We were just very wishbun obsessed
in my house.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Growing up outside Albany, New York. Aaron McDonough was a
loyal viewer.
Speaker 9 (31:08):
I remember going to the library with my mom and
being big stack of books and Faust was in there,
which was one of my favorite episodes. And you know
in that one he sells his soul to the devil
for a woman, and the librarian looked at me like
dead in the faces. This is not appropriate for children.
You cannot take out this book. And I was like
it was on Wishbone.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Wishbone won several Daytime Emmys, including for those dazzling costumes.
The show also won a Peabody Award for Broadcast Storytelling Excellence. Wishbone,
presented here by Dan Rather, a diminutive canine with a
taste for classic literature, is the star of this next
imaginative series. Soccer was now a bona fide star.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Oh yeah, you couldn't take him anywhere. You couldn't take
him to a public park, no way. I'd be traveling
to an airport. I had to cover his credup for
the towel so people didn't see his face because we
wouldn't get through the airport.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
You're kidding.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
And I have pictures of people waiting in line two
blocks long just to see this dog. Geez. I mean,
it was just incredible just to see him.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Larry Brantley, the voice of Wishbone, remembers one incident at
the height of soccer celebrity. During a promotional trip to DC.
Soccer stayed in one night while Larry and the other
humans went out for dinner. When they came back, they
found their hotel suite in disarray.
Speaker 7 (32:37):
He trashed it. He went after the comforter on the bed,
tore that both the pillowcases and pillows gone. He crawled
under the bed. You know that black matting that holds
the box bring in all that's out just cluttered around
the room like confetti. She was so upset, and I'm like, Jackie,
this was his rockstar moment.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
So what happened after Wishbone ended? What did soccer do?
Speaker 3 (33:01):
He just ran the ranch and hung out with me,
and you know, I just really felt like he gave
me his heart. And I also didn't want him on
film because he was so recognizable as Wishbone and everybody's
going to see him and go, that's Wishbob. What's he
doing that for? And I think he really deserved his
(33:22):
time to retire because he did his job. He never
let me down, he never quit me, And to me,
that's the ultimate.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Soccer died on June twenty sixth two thousand and one.
He was thirteen.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
I don't think you ever get used to it. I've
had dogs my whole life, and you never get used
to losing one of them. People think, oh, she has
a lot of dogs, that it's not hard for her. No,
it's really hard. I missed him a lot. I still
miss him.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
What kind of a reaction did his death get.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
I didn't really tell anybody for a year or so.
I just you know, it's such a personal thing. He
was a public dog on video, but he was still
my private dog. He was my dog, and that's between
me and him. And I didn't want people to see
him when he got really old, and he couldn't hardly see.
(34:20):
You know, everybody's going to get old. I wanted him
to have dignity because he was such a pretty outgoing, happy,
go lucky kind of guy. Yeah. I was sorry to
see him go.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Well.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I apologize for being so hard to get a hold
of it. You know, when you retire, you become very irresponsible.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Good for you.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
When I think of soccer now, I think of the
former kids who still get excited when I tell them
I wrote for the show. I think of the blazing
heat of the Texas summer when we shot outside, and
how jealous I was that Soccer had an air conditioned
too he could rest in between takes. I kind of
wanted to crawl in there with him. I think of
how fortunate I was that my very first job in
(35:07):
television was on a show where so much love went
into the final product. And I think of Soccer's gorgeous face.
Those eyes really did tell stories. Damn, he really was
a good looking dog.
Speaker 4 (35:20):
It's this really cute show that I feel like too
few people know about.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
At this point, the reason I have all these books
is in my fault.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
It's this guy's fault.
Speaker 8 (35:30):
Why all the books? What happened?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
What's the story Wishbone?
Speaker 9 (35:34):
When it comes up that one of your adult friends
also watched Wishbone, like, that's a conversation that can last
another hour, you know.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I certainly hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask
you to please rate and review our podcast. You can
also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can
follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Hear all new episodes
of Mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts and
check out Mobituary's Great Lives Worth Reliving the New York
(36:03):
Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook.
It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Aaron Schrank. Our team
of producers also includes Wilcom Martinez Caccero, and me Morocca.
It was edited by Mara Walls and engineered by Josh Hahn,
(36:24):
with fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our production company is
Neon hum Media. Our archival producer at CBS is Jamie Benson.
Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Indispensable support
from Craig Schwagler, Dustin Gervai, Alan Pang, Reggie Bazil and
everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks to Gideon Evans,
(36:45):
Kate mccauliffe and Alberto Robina. Our senior producer is the
Irrepressible Aaron Schrank. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Steve Razi's
and Morocca. The series is created by Yours Truly and
as always on dying gratitude to Rand Morrison and John
carp for helping breathe life into Mobituaries.
Because of your extraordinary bravery and intelligence, you have earned
the titles of Honorary Corporal Rusty and Honorary Private Rint Tintin.
Ever since Rin Tin Tin, the superstar German shepherd who
on screen rescued plenty of people and off screen, rescued
Warner Brothers from bankruptcy in the nineteen twenties, dogs have
(00:23):
played leading roles in Hollywood.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Look there's Tuto, where do you come from from?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Kansas's most courageous Cairn.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Terrier Who's come to take us to dog?
Speaker 1 (00:36):
To the collie who seemed to save more people in
the nineteen fifties than the polio vaccine did. To the
Golden retriever who held court in the air Bud movies,
Doots Don't played basketball?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Was the matter?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Gentlemen?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Afraid your team might get beat by a dog?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
But I'm not sure any dog has ever played a
role as multifaceted as the one played by the Jack
Russell terrier, who starred in the nineteen nineties PBS television
series Wishbone.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Believe me it was.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Nothing, Hey, whishbird, Let's have some meat.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Look?
Speaker 6 (01:16):
Did I hear you say?
Speaker 7 (01:17):
Me?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Love?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
That dog's real name was soccer now as Wishbone, he
didn't just beg for treats.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
Soccer was a total action hero dog. Soccer was winning
battles and getting knighted and solving mysteries.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Look closely, the clues could be anywhere.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
No one is above suspicion. Wishbone, it turns out, had
a rich fantasy life. In each episode, he imagined himself
as the hero in a different work of classic literature.
Viewers at home saw him leading a merry band of
outlaws against the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Speaker 6 (01:58):
Robin Hood actual of us.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
So romancing like Shakespeare's Romeo.
Speaker 8 (02:05):
With Love's like wings, did I or perch these walls?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And inspired by Jules Vern digging deep, going where no
dog or man had gone before, proof.
Speaker 8 (02:17):
That we are on the right track, on one to
the Sun, God of the Eye.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
For the show's target audience of six to eleven year olds,
Soccer became a tween idol.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I have pictures of people waiting in line two blocks
long just to see this dog.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
What's the story, Wishbone? What's this?
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Your dreaming?
Speaker 9 (02:42):
Enough such?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Today there's a whole pack of grown ups out there
who were first winged on Mark Twain or the Legend
of Faust, or the Greek epics through Wishbone.
Speaker 9 (02:55):
I remember, like on my tenth birthday, I think it
was we were gonna go mini golfing and I insisted,
but we had to stay home for Wishbone first, and as.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
A twenty five year old a mere puff myself, I
got to write for Wishbone. I've told people that writing
for the show was like an assignment from an English
professor on assets.
Speaker 6 (03:13):
It totally was.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
So much went into this show to make it a hit,
but none of it would have worked without the top dog.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
I think every movie star has eyes that tell stories,
and Soccer had the most amazing dog eyes.
Speaker 7 (03:35):
He was a magic little creature man, he really was.
He looked so good on camera.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
I shouldn't say this, so he wasn't the smartest dog
I've ever turned, but he was so devoted once he
learned it. He would walk on water for me. He
just loved to be out with me working. To him,
it wasn't work.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Morocca and this
is mobituaries, This mobid Wishbone. June twenty sixth, two thousand
and one. Death of a working dog. All right, So
(04:18):
what was Wishbone about. Well, let's have some fans who
grew up with the show explain.
Speaker 9 (04:25):
So it was called Wishbone, and it was this little dog,
Jack Russell Terrier.
Speaker 8 (04:31):
Wishbone has a love for classic literature.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
And then he would like magically transport himself into stories.
Wishbone is a children's television show that aired on PBS's
the nineteen nineties, and it is the only.
Speaker 6 (04:43):
Reason why I ever passed in English class because I
did not do the reading.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Okay, now my turn. The show was about a dog
named Wishbone who lived in a town called Oakdale. Wishbone
would get into all sorts of adventures with his owner,
a boy named Joe, and the other neighbor hood kids,
and those adventures would remind Wishbone of stay with me
here stories from classic literature. It could be a novel
(05:09):
like Treasure Island, and epic poem like Homer's Odyssey in
African folk tale like Anansi the Spider.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Wishbone read a lot.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
He didn't waste time watching TV, just go with it,
and so each episode alternated between Wishbone living his regular
life in Oakdale and his fantasy life as the hero
of classic literature. Twin plots thematically connected more about his
fantasy life later. Basically, Wishbone the show was all about story,
(05:37):
but the story of the dog who played Wishbone begins
with an animal trainer named Jackie Captain. Hello Jackie, Yes,
it's Moe.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Oh my goodnessistant so long.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
It's been more than twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Jackie's been living off the grid way up in Haynes, Alaska.
You're not easy to get a hold of.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, that's the reason I came up here. No, I
retired eight years ago. It's beautiful up here. Good fishing
bears walked through my property.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Do you think the bears know your background with animals
and that they kind of respect it?
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Well, I've kind of told them, Look, we're on common
ground here. You leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Jackie actually began her career in motion pictures working with
wild animals, including bears, but she learned much of what
she knows about training dogs from famed Hollywood trainer Frank Ann.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
I went to work for him, and that was probably
the best experience I had learning how to do dogs
for motion picture.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Frank Inn worked on Lassie, I Love Lucy. He trained
Audrey Hepburn's orange tabby cat in Breakfast to Tiffany's. He
wrangled all five hundred of the animals comprising LIMEE. Clampitt's
cast of critters on the Beverly Hillbillies. Critters will new
things for that girl, wouldn't do for nobody else. Here
he is training the lovable mutt who's starred in the
(07:13):
Benji movies.
Speaker 8 (07:15):
Come on, nudget, Benji, Please, come on, come on, nudget, nudget.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Good kid, Look here, feet up, stay a spe And.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
He just was this larger than life character, big man
with a big hand of our mustache and a captain's hat.
And you just couldn't forget him if he ever saw
him work a dog.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Frank Inn helped Jackie launch her own career. She worked
on the nineteen eighty three horror movie Kujojo about a
rabbit Saint Bernard Kuser, which manner, and she helped Ethan
Hawke bond with a surly wolfhound in White Fang.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Just wanted to pet him.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
White Fang was shot up in Haines, Alaska. Jackie says
she you then that one day she'd retire. There have
you got any dogs up there.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
I only have one dog left, which is really weird
for me. I have the Beverly Hills Chihuahua Rosa.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Oh my gosh, and remember Rosa. There's nothing wrong with
being different.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Different.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
It is just a nice way of saying run.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah. She's twelve now, she only weighs three pounds.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
She's the Beverly Hills Chihuaba and she's living in Haines, Alaska,
surrounded by grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
How's that working out?
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Well, she doesn't go out much, I mean, because everything
wants to get her, the eagles, I mean, you know,
so she pretty much just stays in the cabin.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
But Jackie, I know you're retired, but this just screams
out for a Beverly Hills Chihuaba sequel, I mean, escape
to Alaska.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
I know it does, doesn't it. I like that idea.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Jackie met the dog who would one day play Wishbone
back in nineteen eighty eight in Connecticut when he was
just a week old, and.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I said, that is the cutest pubby I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Jackie took him home that very day and named him Soccer.
But because of Soccer's markings, brown patches around his left
eye and right ear. Casting directors thought he looked too
much like the Little Rascals dog Pete. Pretty soon it
seemed clear Soccer's acting career was going nowhere.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah, he didn't do much at all until he did
Wishbone and he was six or seven.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I think six or seven in dog years.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
You do the math.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
He was getting up there has been without ever having.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Been my husband. And all my friends were like, really, Jaggy,
why do you spend so much time training on this dog.
I like this dog. He's my buddy. I don't care
if he ever works. I like this dog. And they'd
all laugh at man. I'm telling you, one day, this
dog is going to get what he deserves.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
In nineteen ninety three, auditions for the lead role in
Wishbone were announced, Butackie was tied up on another project.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
I was in Montana working on River Wild.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
And she wasn't particularly interested.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I'm tied up on a feature movie.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Here, you know, sidebar. I loved the River Wild, an
action adventure starring a buff Meryl Streep opposite an evil
Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 6 (10:20):
Woo woo woo.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
You the dog expended who right, now who, I think I'll.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Go oh oo oo oo.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
The dog who.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
But the Wishbone team liked Soccer's look and prevailed on
Jackie to bring him in for an audition, and Soccer
wowed them.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
He wasn't just charming, he.
Speaker 5 (10:43):
Pulled off all of his tricks with the cool, confidence,
even cockiness of a jung Claude van Dam. He sealed
the deal with a backflip, which you can see in
the show's opening credits. Now, Jackie could get Soccer to
do a lot, but she couldn't make him.
Speaker 7 (10:59):
Actually, when I first was asked to audition to be
the voice of Wishbone, I had no idea what the
show was.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
That became the job of stand up comic and voiceover
actor Larry Brantley.
Speaker 7 (11:13):
And I've done this my whole life with animals. I
watch an animal and I think I know what they're thinking.
I don't know why I think that, but I'm just
I'm convinced I know what's going on in that tiny
little head, and I'm pretty good at verbalizing it.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Wishbone had his voice, and so in the summer of
nineteen ninety four, trainer Jackie Captain packed her bags and
Soccer for the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, where Wishbone would
be filmed. I know, Texas in the summer. It's not pretty.
But any skepticism Jackie might have felt had melted away.
She was now sold on the idea of the show.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
You know, this could be the last thing that I do,
and it seems like it's important. It's educationalal for children,
it'll get them to read again. And it would just
hit me, it drew me, and it was like this
little dog could really bring this alive. Of course, Soccer
(12:09):
would never go with anybody else. He'd always been.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
With me, so you had to be there.
Speaker 10 (12:13):
Well.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
I mean, he was a great little dog, but he
had a soft side to him. And if I wasn't there,
I don't know that he would have danced the jig
like he did.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
And in fact, he did dance jigs. I mean he
did kind of every behavior.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Really.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Oh, there was times when we do production meetings that
I'd take really, folks in my head, he doesn't have thumbs.
I don't know how he's going to shoot a bow
and arrow. It was like, oh, my goodness, who wrote this?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Well?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
I was one of the people who wrote for Wishbone,
and writing for this dog would end up being one
of the most formative experiences of my life.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Did you ever think you'd end up writing for a dog?
Speaker 7 (12:58):
No?
Speaker 6 (12:58):
I didn't, No, I did not.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
That's my friend Stephanie Simpson. She was Wishbone's supervising producer,
story editor, and head writer.
Speaker 6 (13:10):
However, in the early days, when I was trying to
figure out how to do it, I remembered that I
had always made up dialogue and sort of monologues for
our cat, and so in thinking about Wishbone, I don't know,
it just seemed natural. Suddenly, I have to say, to
write Wishbone someone's pet as having this very rich inner
(13:33):
life that you were not aware of.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Over my career, I've been fortunate to work for a
few people who put everything they humanly could into making
something good, who wouldn't let up until it was as
right as it could be. But Stephanie has been singular
in my life. She taught me more than anyone how
to tell a story. If Soccer had Jackie, I had Stephanie.
(14:00):
Sephanie had majored in Russian literature at Yale and earned
a Masters in drama at Harvard. She was perfectly trained
for this bizarre task. Of course, she couldn't do it alone.
And that's when I got the call. At the time,
I was in a production of South Pacific at New
Jersey's paper Mill Playhouse.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
We got volleyball, any games we got.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Stephanie brought me down to Dallas to interview with Wishbone
executive producer Rick Duffield, who hired me as a staff writer.
I began working with Stephanie in what felt like a
storytelling boot camp. Now, as I explained earlier, each episode
(14:48):
of the show connected a modern day storyline in the
fictional town of Oakdale to a different work of classic literature.
Here's Wishbone as Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Who is her mother?
Speaker 10 (15:01):
Her mother is the lady of the house?
Speaker 6 (15:04):
Oh, Lady of the Ooh is she a capulate?
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Who is that gentleman? His name is Romeo?
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Now in the contemporary plot line for that episode, one
of the neighborhood kids, Samantha, falls in love with a
beagle named Rosie at the local pound and wants to
adopt her. Would you're dad that.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
You have a go if you sell this dog?
Speaker 4 (15:26):
He couldn't say no.
Speaker 6 (15:27):
The contemporary world was a way to show that there
were themes and ideas in these in these great books
that could be translated into a kid's life. So you
could fall in love with the dog at the pound,
and suddenly that could be the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Now there wasn't going to be a suicide in the
(15:47):
contemporary story as there is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
But there could be heartbreak. There could be a dog
is adopted before you are able to adopt it.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Sam. Sorry, I know how much you liked Rosie.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
And so you have to deal with some kind of loss.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
I'm glad she's okay.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I mean, she really needed to get home.
Speaker 10 (16:10):
For me.
Speaker 6 (16:11):
The exciting thing was trying to match the thread to
what I thought would capture a kid's imagination and also
their hearts. What would they care the most about?
Speaker 1 (16:22):
And it never occurred to you that an episode should
with all due respect, because I have nothing against Cliff's notes,
and they pronounced Cliff's notes, and for somebody who has trouble.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
With essays, it's a lot of essays.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
But anyway, but because it could have been in other hands,
it would have been Okay, we're going to do the
totality of this book in the half hour.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
No, that never Actually, I never felt pressure to do that.
What I felt pressure to do was to get someone
to fall in love with the idea.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Of the book. The idea of the book.
Speaker 6 (16:57):
The idea of the book, not the plot, the lot
of the because there's only so many plots in the world.
Plot really, to me, in a book is not the point.
The point is how the author has taken a set
of events and made them mean something different than they've
ever met before because of who exactly is doing them
(17:17):
and why they're doing them.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
If LeVar Burton's show Reading Rainbow was teaching kids how
to read, Wishbone was showing kids why great books matter.
Speaker 6 (17:28):
And to me, it's not like the authors of these
books never wrote them so that the books themselves would
be kind of locked away from everyday people. I mean
no offense to literature majors, but I think it would
be very disappointing for Savantes to find out that only
a small group of select students at a university we're
(17:53):
reading don Quixote. That would be super sad for him.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
That's a work that's so sprawling, many ideas there.
Speaker 6 (18:01):
Its like so long to read it, mo, and I had,
you know, maybe three days.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Servante's's Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is about
an idealistic man chasing the impossible dream of becoming a knight.
In the Wishbone version, Joe chases a long shot of
his own eighty.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Six consecutive free throws in five minutes. That's all I
need to hold the record for any kid. N there's sixteen.
Then i'd be in the Encyclopedia of World Records.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Do you really think it's possible.
Speaker 6 (18:37):
Sure, Joe was trying to make a certain number of
baskets and he was having trouble. He would get nervous
and choke. He imagined that his life would be amazing
if he could just achieve this one great thing, and
in the end he doesn't achieve it.
Speaker 4 (18:56):
You were great, but I didn't do the impossible.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
I'm not going down in history or anything.
Speaker 4 (19:04):
I'm not extraordinary. Hey, you don't have to perform impossible
feats to be extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Just live your life. Life is an ongoing adventure.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
But it was the act of trying that matters.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I've told people that writing for the show was like
an assignment from an English professor on Assey.
Speaker 6 (19:25):
It totally was Yes, you are so right, that's a
perfect way to describe it. And what's so funny mo
is looking back on it, I realized how crazy it was,
but at the time when we were doing it, I
didn't think it was that crazy, and it didn't seem
nuts until later.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
To pull this nutty premise off, we had to stick
to some hard and fast rules. For example, yes, Wishbone talks,
thanks to Larry Brantley, but human characters in Wishbone's life
in Oakdale don't hear him. Only the lucky viewers hear
what he's thinking. But when Wishbone is imagining himself as
a character in a book, he's acting opposite human actors
(20:03):
who can hear him.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Mister Darcy, we should be a darling and escorted me
to the punch bow.
Speaker 5 (20:08):
Yes, of course, excuse us, miss Mega the minute.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Part of what was so what was so well immediately
funny was that in the fantasy sequences that Wishbone was
treated as a human.
Speaker 6 (20:22):
I imagine really that Wishbone was a kid. It was
a stand in for a kid who when they act
out stories and they're the star of the movie or
the comic book in their imaginations, or when they're playing
it out with their friends, nobody stops and goes, well,
you're a kid doing this. You're a kid, not a king.
(20:43):
It's funnier that the dog just takes it for granted
that he's doing it and this is his imagination, and
everyone will treat him in his imagination the way he
would expect to be treated.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
People love the show so much, you know.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
It makes me so happy. And one of my goals
and one of the things I think I said to
you and to the whole crew and we were starting,
is we have an opportunity to be the first people
to introduce these stories and images into a child's imagination.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
And I had to tell you also, Stephanie. You know,
for all these years since the project, anything I've tried
to do, I end up going back to wish Phone
and what I learned from you and working on that,
and you know, jack to make me grow well now,
but Jackie, you know, talking about training wish Phone, I thought,
(21:40):
I know, this is a weird way to put it,
but it was like Stephanie trained me really because I
came into it and you know it was I realized
I didn't know what I was doing at first, and
I am so grateful to you for I'm getting emotional,
but I'm so grateful.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Thank you.
Speaker 7 (21:58):
Mo.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Well, I'm I'm so grateful to hear you say that,
because I was under a lot of pressure and it
was difficult.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Sometimes it's scary, right, I don't think I don't know
that you were scared. I was scared at first, and
then you gave me, you gave me the courage to
do it.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (22:19):
I think also that for me, I loved each of
these books so much. This is going to sound corny,
but for me, the joy of it, even though it
was also scary. The thing that over helped me overcome
any fear that I had was once I actually now
(22:40):
I'm going to get emotional.
Speaker 10 (22:45):
Once I actually read the book and fell in love
with it, it seemed like not an easy thing, but
an important thing to transmit that to someone else, to
share that with somebody else, And that was what helped
me overcome the fear of doing it. Was actually the
(23:07):
sheer love of the story and the belief that other
people needed to fall in love with it too.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
There's that proverb it's always darkest before the dawn. That's
certainly my experience with writing the darkness part. Stephanie taught
me by example how important it is not to give
up and how satisfying it is to come out the
other side.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Wish Mode is.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Where I learned not to despair in creating something because
it's like, oh my god, it's really looking dire right now,
it's really looking dire. But this is the project where
I learned that it's at that point that you just
keep pushing through and.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
You're going to get there.
Speaker 6 (23:47):
That's where the leap will happen.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
I still remember how I felt finishing the first episode
I wrote for Wishbone, based on HG. Wells's The Time.
Speaker 8 (23:57):
Machine System destination on Time on New In case of emergency,
keep your heads and arms inside the vehicle, oh stop.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
I remember finishing, and I stayed up all night on
New Year's Eve nineteen ninety four, and it was my
best New Year's Eve ever finishing that script, and it
kind of locking into place quite literally at dawn on
New Year's Day nineteen ninety five, and that felt so
(24:32):
and so I like my New Year's Eves to be
promising and not frivolous to be.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
Epic creation moments of creations. I love it. I also
think it's so fitting that you were writing the time
Machine as the year turned over. That is kind of perfect.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
How will you remember Soccer? Oh?
Speaker 6 (24:55):
I will always remember Soccer as the dog who made
what I imagined in my head even better than I
had imagined it. I really will. I thought, how will
this ever actually happen? How will we ever actually do this?
And then once I saw Soccer on screen, I felt
(25:19):
this relief that this was going to work and it
was going to be even better than I thought it
could be. And that's how I will remember Soccer and
be grateful to Soccer always for that.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Be grateful to him.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
I am grateful to him and his beautiful brown eyes.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Wishbone wasn't just the best red dog on TV. He
was also the best dressed. I mean, this dog was
a total clothes horse. Just his hats alone. There was
the top hat for when he played Doctor Jekyl and
mister Hyde. The adorable straw hat he wore is Tom
Sawyer the Bycocking. That's the name of that cute little
(26:00):
hattie sported as Robinhood Wishbone. Superfans like Claire Conley vividly
recall his costumes. There was an episode where it was
The Tempest and he was aerial and had this sort
of like flowy costume that was really cute that I
liked a lot. Trust me, you'll want to look up
Wishbone's Tempest to wardrobe. We're talking Liberachi level over the top.
(26:23):
Costume designer Stephen Chewedadge and his team dressed an entire
cast in a different period specific wardrobe each episode, head
to toe or head to tail in the case of
our star. Chewed Edge talked to Entertainment Tonight in nineteen
ninety five.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
The challenge is sizing down human clothes and making them
actually fit a dog.
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Dogs have a different anatomy than than humans, as is obvious, and.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Of course too, we have to we have to make
things that he will wear well.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
For Ivanhoe, he was wearing chain mail. Dogs don't wear
chain mail ordinarily.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Well, they don't wear pants either.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
That's soccer's trainer, Jackie Captain again, Mark Twain.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Remember he had pants and we'd all laugh, you know,
I'd never had him backflip with pants. Yeah, he kind
of looked at me like, really, yeah, you can do it,
It's okay. So that took a few days for him
to get used to the pants.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Of course, it wasn't just that backflip you saw on
the opening credits. Soccer had to learn all sorts of
new tricks and performed them in costume. Jackie trained him
to belly crawl through the fog of war in the
Red Patch of Courage episode, she trained him to pull
the lever on the time machine.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
I think when we went there we had like fifteen behaviors,
different tricks, and by the time we finished Wishbone, he
had like forty tricks. I was like, how many tricks
can one little dog store in his little brain? But
he was so devoted once he learned it. He would
(28:05):
walk on water for me.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Well you say he'd walk on water for you. But
to be fair, he didn't really like water, did he.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
No, he didn't.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Okay, it's a bit I don't like water.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Most of the water work.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Including an epic scene from the Odyssey episode, was handled
by a stunt dog named Phoebe Daily. Yes, there were
other dogs.
Speaker 6 (28:34):
Phoebe was amazing, and Phoebe was fearless right, she was
Hammler to Linda Hamilton, Phoebe could leap off of things,
she could swim lap, she I think sat on a horse.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
At one point there was another stunt double. And I
say this affectionately, but this dog had a face for radio.
I mean, this was a dog that I remember looking
a little Jimmy Duranty like. Is that a fair way
of characterizing Slugger or my being unfair?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Oh, Slugger, he was so cute. He's such a sweet dog.
I forgot about Slugger.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Sorry, Slugger, but rest assured. Soccer was in almost every scene.
Speaker 6 (29:16):
But what's interesting about the other dogs is that none
of them were close up dogs. It was still Soccer
who was the star. The wishbone, those markings, those eyes,
and one other thing I can say about Soccer's acting
was his ability to look focused. Soccer's look at the
(29:37):
other actor appeared as if he really was taking in
what they were saying.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
I remember on set after the director called action, often
the only other voice you'd hear was Jackie's speaking directly
to her dog.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
When I was just working him on the set, my
voice would be just kind of normal. I rehearse him
to something Gomark day. Good. But then when we were
done and he did exactly what I wanted, I wanted
him to know that that was correct, and I'd go
good for you good, and you could see that he'd
be like, yes, I get it, and that means a
(30:15):
lot to them. Or when we were doing backflip, that's
a really hard behavior, and I'd always go ready, ready,
and that kind of geared him up to what we
were doing.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Ready flip. The show debuted on October ninth, nineteen ninety five,
and soon developed a with all due respect to Kujo
rapid following.
Speaker 8 (30:37):
As you know, Wishbone is the star of the mega.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
Popular, award winning children's show on PBS Design to introduce
kids to literature.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I give you once again the Wishbone super fans.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
What more could you ask for?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
It's the perfect kid show. You got a cute dog,
you got education.
Speaker 9 (30:55):
I remember my first exposure to like William Shakespeare was
from this frickin' dog. We were just very wishbun obsessed
in my house.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Growing up outside Albany, New York. Aaron McDonough was a
loyal viewer.
Speaker 9 (31:08):
I remember going to the library with my mom and
being big stack of books and Faust was in there,
which was one of my favorite episodes. And you know
in that one he sells his soul to the devil
for a woman, and the librarian looked at me like
dead in the faces. This is not appropriate for children.
You cannot take out this book. And I was like
it was on Wishbone.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Wishbone won several Daytime Emmys, including for those dazzling costumes.
The show also won a Peabody Award for Broadcast Storytelling Excellence. Wishbone,
presented here by Dan Rather, a diminutive canine with a
taste for classic literature, is the star of this next
imaginative series. Soccer was now a bona fide star.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Oh yeah, you couldn't take him anywhere. You couldn't take
him to a public park, no way. I'd be traveling
to an airport. I had to cover his credup for
the towel so people didn't see his face because we
wouldn't get through the airport.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
You're kidding.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
And I have pictures of people waiting in line two
blocks long just to see this dog. Geez. I mean,
it was just incredible just to see him.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Larry Brantley, the voice of Wishbone, remembers one incident at
the height of soccer celebrity. During a promotional trip to DC.
Soccer stayed in one night while Larry and the other
humans went out for dinner. When they came back, they
found their hotel suite in disarray.
Speaker 7 (32:37):
He trashed it. He went after the comforter on the bed,
tore that both the pillowcases and pillows gone. He crawled
under the bed. You know that black matting that holds
the box bring in all that's out just cluttered around
the room like confetti. She was so upset, and I'm like, Jackie,
this was his rockstar moment.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
So what happened after Wishbone ended? What did soccer do?
Speaker 3 (33:01):
He just ran the ranch and hung out with me,
and you know, I just really felt like he gave
me his heart. And I also didn't want him on
film because he was so recognizable as Wishbone and everybody's
going to see him and go, that's Wishbob. What's he
doing that for? And I think he really deserved his
(33:22):
time to retire because he did his job. He never
let me down, he never quit me, And to me,
that's the ultimate.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Soccer died on June twenty sixth two thousand and one.
He was thirteen.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
I don't think you ever get used to it. I've
had dogs my whole life, and you never get used
to losing one of them. People think, oh, she has
a lot of dogs, that it's not hard for her. No,
it's really hard. I missed him a lot. I still
miss him.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
What kind of a reaction did his death get.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
I didn't really tell anybody for a year or so.
I just you know, it's such a personal thing. He
was a public dog on video, but he was still
my private dog. He was my dog, and that's between
me and him. And I didn't want people to see
him when he got really old, and he couldn't hardly see.
(34:20):
You know, everybody's going to get old. I wanted him
to have dignity because he was such a pretty outgoing, happy,
go lucky kind of guy. Yeah. I was sorry to
see him go.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Well.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I apologize for being so hard to get a hold
of it. You know, when you retire, you become very irresponsible.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Good for you.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
When I think of soccer now, I think of the
former kids who still get excited when I tell them
I wrote for the show. I think of the blazing
heat of the Texas summer when we shot outside, and
how jealous I was that Soccer had an air conditioned
too he could rest in between takes. I kind of
wanted to crawl in there with him. I think of
how fortunate I was that my very first job in
(35:07):
television was on a show where so much love went
into the final product. And I think of Soccer's gorgeous face.
Those eyes really did tell stories. Damn, he really was
a good looking dog.
Speaker 4 (35:20):
It's this really cute show that I feel like too
few people know about.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
At this point, the reason I have all these books
is in my fault.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
It's this guy's fault.
Speaker 8 (35:30):
Why all the books? What happened?
Speaker 1 (35:31):
What's the story Wishbone?
Speaker 9 (35:34):
When it comes up that one of your adult friends
also watched Wishbone, like, that's a conversation that can last
another hour, you know.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
I certainly hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask
you to please rate and review our podcast. You can
also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can
follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Hear all new episodes
of Mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts and
check out Mobituary's Great Lives Worth Reliving the New York
(36:03):
Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook.
It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Aaron Schrank. Our team
of producers also includes Wilcom Martinez Caccero, and me Morocca.
It was edited by Mara Walls and engineered by Josh Hahn,
(36:24):
with fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our production company is
Neon hum Media. Our archival producer at CBS is Jamie Benson.
Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Indispensable support
from Craig Schwagler, Dustin Gervai, Alan Pang, Reggie Bazil and
everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks to Gideon Evans,
(36:45):
Kate mccauliffe and Alberto Robina. Our senior producer is the
Irrepressible Aaron Schrank. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Steve Razi's
and Morocca. The series is created by Yours Truly and
as always on dying gratitude to Rand Morrison and John
carp for helping breathe life into Mobituaries.
Host
Mo Rocca
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