The Canine Take on Literary Classics in What’s the Story, Wishbone?

If you grew up in the mid-Nineties, there’s a good chance that your first exposure to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey wasn’t from taking middle school English lit. It was because of a dog.

From 1995 to 1998, PBS’ Wishbone became one of the most unlikely successes in TV history. The series was centered on a Jack Russell Terrier called Wishbone: As played by a canine actor called Soccer and voiced by Larry Brantley, the four-legged resident of the sleepy suburb of Oakdale was simply a dog. Yet he would dream of himself as the protagonist of classic works of literature, from Victor Frankenstein to King Arthur, and comparisons would be drawn between their adventures and what was happening in Wishbone’s family’s lives.

The amazing story behind this still beloved show is finally being recounted in a documentary. What’s the Story, Wishbone? screens on Austin PBS tonight. It will then be available on PBS Passport until June 9 before arriving on VOD June 10.

The documentary isn’t simply a work by fans. Instead, it’s from the people who made the show. Coproduced and narrated by Brantley, it’s produced by series producer Elizabeth “Betty” Buckley, and directed by Joey Stewart, who was an assistant director on almost every episode.

This was a moment in time when North Texas became the unexpected center of children’s TV.  While Wishbone’s interiors were shot at a converted warehouse in Plano, it used the backlot of Lyrick Studios in Allen for exteriors, near to where Lyrick’s other smash, Barney & Friends, was shooting. Creating Wishbone came with a demanding schedule, with 50 episodes, plus a feature length finale, Wishbone’s Dog Days of the West, in three years. That’s 50 literary adaptations with production values rarely seen in kids TV at that point, including big sets and complicated VFX, with an acting ensemble beyond the core cast that was on call for the reenactment sequences. This was all done with a crew and cast that were local hires (Soccer and his owner and trainer, Jackie Kaptan, excepted). “It was ambitious,” Stewart said. “Every week, having to get brand-new costumers that were period accurate to the script, cast those characters, build those sets.”

“Fourteen carpenters and twelve painters,” Buckley added. “Two art directors, one production designer …”

“And just enough inexperience so that we weren’t bothered by what we didn’t know,” Brantley laughed.

And this was all being done with a dog as the lead actor. Fortunately, he was a pro. “You guys loved him, but boy did we love him,” Buckley said. Soccer was “a very good boy, and we learned very quickly from Jackie Kaptan that he’s there to work, he loves to work, and she set the rules and parameters for how he worked.”

That meant a strict no-petting rule, so Soccer could concentrate on his part. Stewart said that, in hindsight, he realized how spoiled he was as a director. “Being so young in my career, I thought all on-camera animals could do what he did. You’re used to animals going from A to B and looking at the camera and that’s all, but he would go from A to B to C to D and pick up things, all in the same shot.”

Casting photo of Soccer, who would portray Wishbone in 50 episodes

As the voice of Wishbone, working on the set and riffing lines for Wishbone, Brantley said, “That dog provided more opportunity for me to play inside of a scene than had I been working with a fellow human actor.”

Soccer was capable of so much that the creative team would forget that they were still dealing with a dog. Stewart said, “We’d break down the script work out all of Soccer’s behaviors we’d need, we’d meet with the trainers, they’d work through all the tricks with the directors and then remind the director that Soccer doesn’t have thumbs.”

Wishbone was also famous for never talking down to its audience, instead willingly embracing challenging material. For example, Brantley’s favorite episode was “The Canine Cure,” which was a surrealist adaptation of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid. Buckley recalled that the selection process for source material came down to a handful of criteria used by showrunner Stephanie Simpson. “It started from a business perspective, if it was public domain, so we had a research team looking at that. We looked at the variety and if we could accomplish it. But most importantly, there had to be a good role for Wishbone to play.”

Aside from being a seminal series for many kids at the time, it also became a smash with an unexpected demographic: college kids. Brantley recalled being sent to Massachusetts with Soccer for promotional events. “My job was to get out and entertain people waiting in line to get a picture with a dog,” he said. When they got to the date in Boston, “I saw about these college students and they all had their jerseys on from MIT and Harvard and Boston College. One of them stepped out of line and said, ‘Can we take a picture with you?’ I asked, well, sure, how many want to be in the picture, and about 30 of them stepped out and I said, ‘Why are you all here? This is not a line to get into Starbucks.’ And they said, ‘We watch Wishbone.’ I remember getting out an electronic mail – which was a new thing we were doing at the time – to [series creator] Rick Duffield and Betty, and I went, ‘I think we blew open the demographic.’”

Sadly, that success was short-lived. The show’s big budget – often a million dollars an episode – was straining finances, and arguments over merchandising and scheduling meant a curtailed second season and then cancellation.

This meant there were many literary adaptations that the team never got to the screen. Stewart grew up with a first edition of Dracula at home so that was his dream, while Buckley just wished that they’d been able to make more feature-length adventures like Wishbone’s Dog Days of the West. For Brantley, it was Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “Wishbone wasn’t going to be Captain Nemo. He was going to be the professor who makes the Faustian deal with Nemo to go on these adventures. I loved it, and Stephanie loved it too, but she went, ‘Honey, we don’t have the money for that.’”

For whatever sadness surrounds the premature end of the show, for the trio what’s most important about revisiting those times for What’s the Story, Wishbone? is the joy it has brought them. It’s allowed them to recall a time when they helped change what could be expected of kids TV, and see the impact their show continued to have on audiences in the intervening decades. Moreover, the project has reunited so many members of the cast and crew. During the two days of in-studio interviews, their former colleagues would just stick around off-camera, just to catch up. Buckley said, “It was like a family reunion with family you really wanted to be with.”

“There was a lot of hugs and a lot of tears,” Brantley said. “Gi Gi Coker, who was not only in the film but also did our hair and makeup for our film, had to come out and go, ‘Honey, if you’re going to have your happy reunion, do it before I get them in their chair. You’re ruining their makeup.”

What’s the Story, Wishbone? screens on Austin PBS tonight, June 1 and will be available on PBS Passport until June 9 before arriving on VOD June 10.

The post The Canine Take on Literary Classics in What’s the Story, Wishbone? appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.