Wishbone (featuring Mo Rocca): Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little loan facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your highly literate Jack Russell Terriers of Trivia. My name is Jordan Runt Dog, and I'm Alex Age. Now, folks, Higo and I have been doing the show twice a week, sometimes more for eight months now, and frankly our marriage of the minds has gone a bit stale. So today, to spice things up, we brought in a third person. I'm gonna stop that analogy right there. We are very, very honored to be joined by an extremely special guest, Mr Morocca. He is a journalist who is as brilliant as he is hilarious. His passionate and insightful dispatches on CBS Sunday Morning, The Daily Show, the Food Network, not to mention his books in his podcast, have long served as a reminder to me and surely so many others, to stay curious. It's so important, and I'm grateful for all the joy that he's given me and for all that I've learned through him. MO, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Jordan, thank you for that introduction. I'm happy to be with you both. In addition to everything I've just mentioned, Mo is responsible for a beloved part of my televisual if that's the word upbringing, and perhaps yours as well. Wishbone. Yes, the little dog with the big imagination who introduced me and many of my millennial kin to classic literature. We'll dive into the creation of this beloved PBS classic in a moment, but before we get to that, Mo, you're in the midst of the third season of your incredible podcast, Mobit Juries, And for any who don't know, and if you haven't listened, please pause this right now and go subscribe. It's based on your book of the same name, which offers deep dives into extraordinary lives that have been sort of relegated to the sidelines of history despite their fascinating stories. Are there any episodes for you that have stuck out as being the most surprising or intriguing boy and the most surprising and intriguing, Well, it was fun doing an episode on names that have died in the whole podcast is sort of my kind of salute people and things that I don't feel like got the proper send off the first time around, or maybe even any sent off at all. And so it was fun chatting with John mcward, who's a linguist about names that have come and gone over the over the years. Um, we focused on Mildred, Bertha, and Todd because I had no idea that Todd really fell off a cliff in the early Yeah. So I think if you were in high school in the late eighties, like I was, you knew a lot of Todd's. But that was the last wave of Todd's. There are no baby Todds running around right now. Who tracks that? Uh, the Social Security Administration. There's a website and yeah, and they track it, and they don't have a lot of Todds to keep track up. And they've got even fewer Mildred's in Bertha's. But I'm just wondering, you know, old timey names like that. It's sort of you know a lot of here about celebrities naming their kids Hazel and things like that, right right, right, And but but you know, no birthas, no Mildred's, you know. So I feel about Gary. We need a baby Gary, a baby Gary with one hour or two. I feel I feel like I feel like a baby named Gary was born with a bad back and five o'clock shadow and a mortgage. I was reading about, as I often do, uh, the Universal Monsters era, and do you know Todd Browning, the director who did Freaks and Dracula. He made his name with one D so it would be the German word for death. So can you bring that back? Well, he really wasn't freak. He was a weird dude. Weird dude. I was telling Jordan when he came up at one point, and he had one of those bizarre early twenty century American man cvs that don't happen anymore. Like he was like a star boy tenor in his choir and then became like a hobo roustabout Tyler, you know, and then in the transition from silence to talkies, uh, sort of lost his way, but a fascinating guy. God, can you imagine being able to put on your checks return hobo roused about are going to this year? You've tried? Yeah, Well, there's just so many great stories. I mean, we did an episode recently on how the Grinch Stole Christmas? And I love that you saluted the woman of a thousand voices, June Frey. Being from outside of Boston, I loved your episode on von Meeder jfk impersonator who his career took a dive pretty quickly for obvious reasons. Well, you know, he was so famous in that comedy album one album of the Year, The First Family, where he and some other actors portrayed John F. Kennedy and his family, and after the president was murdered. I mean, granted von Meeter lived, that's a good thing, but he became this living reminder of this terrible day, and it was almost sort of kind of I mean that he lived for forty years kind of in the desert, just walking around. The thing that I found the most sort of kind of haunting is in this old archival tape we found of him, taken towards the end of his life. He mentioned walking down Second Avenue in Manhattan and a construction worker stopping what he was doing, walking over to von Meter displacing his hand on his shoulder like comfortingly, and that von Meter kind of wanted to smack the guy and say I'm not dead, you know, But people were treated him almost kind of like a ghost. Wow, that is incredible. I mean down so many. I mean I also I need to ask you, just as a big sitcom fan, and this has troubled me for for many years. Richie cunning Him Richie Cunningham's older brother, rather Chuck. Where is he well, I mean all he Chuck cunning him, the former older brother, but she cunning him did for those first couple of seasons of Happy Days was dribble of basketball and Edith Sandway and I think sometimes do that at the same time. But he just went upstairs one episode and never came down. And Gary Marshall, the creator of Happy Days, was kind of smart enough to know that the audience would just be okay with that that all we needed was the fons all Richie need. Why would he go to Chuck for any advice on on dating or anything else when he had the fons out back? And for the record, at two are Gary, that isn't Gary, that is you know he my favorite Gary's have two rs. Gary Trudeau is a two are Gary. Yeah. And then Garry Gilmore the serial Killer was a one R Gary. That tells you something towards the unified theory of garyus. The Gary cinematic universe is building. Yes, well, there are just so many amazing stories on Obituarious. And I didn't know until listening to an episode from this season called Death of a Working Dog that you wrote for Wishbone. It was really your first professional writing gig, and it sounds like it was a formative influence on you. You've described it as a storytelling boot camp said at one point in the episode, everything you do seems to come back to Wishbone, and I wanted to ask you more about that, like, how did that influence your storytelling? Oh? Gee, was you know? I'll tell you in the middle of it. The Wishbone for your audience members who don't know, was that Jack Russell Terrier who in his dream life became the heroes of classic novels. It was. It was a pretty trippy idea ran on PBS during the nine nineties. You know. One of the things I learned doing it because we would have these little focus groups of kids, and as I said, the audience was six to eleven year olds, and I remember I had the kindergarten group and it was so great to try out material with them and to interview them and realize that they would lose interest if the plot wasn't moving forward basically at all times. So you couldn't just have characters just kind of talking and marking time and bullshitting like they Things had to keep moving forward. Had to be really, really lean. And that's sort of the bigest lesson, one of the biggest lessons I learned in you know, writing a script and telling a story is just how to keep the thing moving forward. Um, So that was one of the lessons. I mean, I basically was taking books for the episodes. I wrote books that you know, I probably should have already read at that point maybe, but now I was getting paid to read them and boil them down and turned them into half hour versions for kids with a dog as the lead. I mean, it was completely insane, this an assignment. Well, without further ado, let's dive in from the real life Jack Russell terrier who inspired the titular dog, to the herculean efforts that went into costuming the show, the painstaking process of rewriting classic literature for a dog, and infuriating reasons the show was prematurely canceled. Here is everything you didn't know about Wishbone. Wishbone was the brandchild of Rick Duffield, the producer who was working at Lyrics Studios, Texas based production company that was responsible for Barney and Friends. In After the global success of Barney, they were looking for new material and Duffield had young kids at the time, and he felt that there was a certain sensibility that was missing from the airwaves. To paraphrase something Moses in his episode of Mobituaries, there were shows that taught kids how to read, but not why to read. Rick was a big dog lover, and to amuse his kids, he up and told stories around the house from the point of view of the family's Jack Russell terrier, and this led to his Eureka moment, As he told The New Yorker in two thousand nine, I had gotten into the habit of giving voice to my own dog's expressions and exploits around the house. One afternoon in late is I struggled to convert that impulse into a show. I gazed at the row of books on my credenza. The one that caught my eye that day was Frank McGill's masterpiece of World Literature. Well, what if a little dog with a big imagination could take us into some of the greatest stories ever told, and why not make him the hero? And the idea had legs with action packs You like that? Yeah, with action pack stories and an adorable dog, it seemed like the perfect way to make reading appealing for kids. The idea morphed into kind of a Walter Midi premise about this day dreaming animal with a fairly boring life and a wrestless imagination, and so there'll be a story set in the real world, which the dog would then liken to a story in classic literature. Duffield really saw this as the perfect time to swing big because this is a fairly elaborate production, because the studio was flushed with Barney Bucks and more apt to take a chance on this cinematic children's show. And apparently there was actually an early version of the show about a bulldog named Knuckles that lived in New Orleans, which sadly didn't make it far off the drawing board. But speaking of dogs, it was time to make a pilot, and that meant that Duffield needed his canine star. In the summer, they auditioned between one hundred and a hundred fifty dogs over the course of two or three days at a Marriott courtyard in Valenti see a California the Duffield later said he didn't have a specific dog in mind when he dreamed up Wishbone. He admitted to being predisposed to the kind of dog he had at home, a Jack Russell Terrier, the same kind as Frasier's dog Eddie, as well as Milo in the Mask and the dog in the artist uh Uggy. I believe that dog's name was I think he had two movies out that year, um popular dog. As far as training goes, easy to train smart dogs, As he told the Albany Sunday Gazette, Duffield not the dog. These are great, great dogs. They have an intelligent look, the way they look and tilt their head like they've got an idea or a thought. They're really very smart, with a bright, eager and attentive quality. The team met some high profile hounds, including those who had started homeward bound and look who's talking now. Then in walked to Jack Russell terrier named Soccer. We should punch in some kind of musical sticker there. John Williams should have scored Wishbone. Honestly, really piss away all that Barney money and just swing for full scale set recreations that John Williams score. Roger Deakins is the cinematographer. Uh Sally Menick is the editor. That's at the end of my behind the scenes Hollywood knowledge. Um. Apparently he was the last dog of the casting session. Whatever the case, it was love at first, bark all out. Maybe you're familiar with Soccer's early work. This is where we've gotten what's his name? Hi, I'm Troy mclarre. No, I'm who's the weird Canadian dude who ambushes musicians with their oldps Nord War surprising Soccer with early commercials for Mighty Dog and Chuck Wagon Dog Food. The dog is a soccer, both due to his markings, which made him resembled the checkered ball, and also his fondness for mini soccer balls. He'd recently fallen on hard times because producers thought that he looked a little too much like the dog from the Little Rascals movie. Pet looks like that, putts pat Get him out of my site, Get him out of my office, blacklist him. You'll never work in this town again. But tail on the way out. So now, at the age of six, Soccer was something of a middle aged has been, or at least until the faithful day he walked into the Marriott courtyard and blew the Wishbone team's collective mind. According to Delfield, the production crew was dazzled. He continued, I thought Soccer was magic as soon as we saw him. He was so expressive. Duffield later said he had a calm, almost zen look. Soccer's sire was the first winner of the Russell Terrier Best of Breed prize at the Cruft's Dog Show in is that the Golden Globes to the Westminster. That sounds about right? Yes, okay, so clearly he had the looks, but he also had the skills. He did a backflip in his audition that blew the producer away. That dog did a backflip. Bring him back, Use the Bonnie money, use the Bonnie slush fond. I want that backflipping dog. Of course, behind every great dog is an equally great trainer. Jackie Captain, the woman who owned Soccer, is something of a legend in Hollywood. She coached the Doberman's that are memorably head conked together after chasing Arnold Schwartzenegger In True Lies by My Beloved James Cameron, who went on to direct Titanic, which is coming. We are doing that soon. You're precious large boat. Uh. Captain also worked with the St Bernard for Coujo, and she helped Ethan Hawk bond with a wolfhound in White Bang. It's interesting. I mean, I wouldn't say that Soccer, who was the dog who played wish Fund had intimacy issues. I think you've just been a star attitude. But we were allowed, very few of us were allowed to touch soccer. And I don't want to be weird about this. I mean, but like because Jackie Captain the amazing and with with her own great history trainer of soccer, and I mean this in the best sense of the word, a real broad. She she really laid down the rules for soccer. And because she needed to have such a connection with the dog, and she needed to be right off camera, right out of the frame of the lens whatever. She needed to be able to have absolute perfect communication with the dog and get Soccer to do whatever she needed him to do. She couldn't have the dog distracted by bonding with too many other people. So the dog could be petted by the actor who played his owner and you know, the mother and the family by a few people and by Jackie off camera, but the rest of us had to really keep our distance from the dog. I just want to make that clear. So I didn't really bond with Soccer at all. I didn't have a real relationship with him. With the dog, I was just a writer, which probably if he were a human he would have treated me the same way because I was a writer. But we did keep pushing the sort of behaviors like we would you know, you know, I can't, but I think the Robin Hood writer had him shooting a bone arrow and which made Jackie go crazy. He did indeed end up doing it because we would use prosthetics. I will say the most complicated thing I probably had him do in a script is in the time Machine, pulled the lever on the actual time machine, and he did manage to do it. I mean, Jackie got him to do it. They didn't have to use a prosthetic for that. That was actually his paw. I think pulling the lever back and you know, thrusting himself a millionaires or whatever it was into the future. But yeah, they were in the red batch of courage. I think, you know, the writer initially had him handling a musket or something like that, and it was nuts. He wouldn't do water work. He was a real diva about water. So in the Odyssey we had a really groundbreaking female stump dog. Her name was Phoebe, and she was sort of like our Linda Hamilton. She could do anything, and she did a lot of stuff with water. Um. Soccer didn't want to go around water. He didn't like loud noises. So there was a I always forget his name, a dog with a face that looked like Jimmy Duranti and I might think Jimmy Durranty, this star slugger, thank you. Yeah, the slugger I think was forced to do the stuff for Red Badge of Courage because I didn't. I don't think Soccer wanted to deal with the noises that come with the Civil War, So in all seriousness, I don't. It's hard to think of another dog on a series that just had to do that much. I don't think last he did that much, and Benji didn't really do anything, and Kujo didn't work that hard. Soccer really busted his little tail on the set. Jackie talks about Rick Dulfield giving her a list of tricks that he wanted her to teach the dog while they were shooting the pilot episodes. Obviously you're more pause on the ground, stuff like hitting your marks, looking right, looking left back. Ha ha. We're not like pun people, but something about this episode is really bringing it out on us. Then when the show got picked up, he came back to her with a longer list, and she said, his little brain can only take so much. Who among us, But by the end of the series, Soccer had learned something like forty behaviors, which is just mind boggling. He was both a total pro and beloved figure on the set. Director of photography Burt Guthrie told Texas Monthly that he would hit his marks as accurately as any actor on his show. I want to go to Burt Guthrie's IMDb and see who he could possibly be shading with that. Actors loved him because he was so expressive. One of the actresses on a behind the scenes clip said he made it so easy for her to tearfully tell him not to go off to war, or how much she really loved him because his face always seemed infused with so much emotion um. His limitations did include people in wigs and beards, and he did not enjoy wearing pants for his for his costumes, but again who among us Soccer hitting his marks, he would earn treats, although sometimes things went south when he found a prop that he'd like that he would rather play tug of war than relinquished it. Between scenes, he did get to hang out in his air condition to dressing room. According to a People Magazine article written by our former worker Tom Glato, Soccer kept in shape for his time on camera with a diet of skinless chicken, grilled and lightly seasoned, and regular exercise. Among his only diva tendencies on set is that he would bark in the car when he wanted the A C turned on, which, granted it was Texas in the summer, I bark in the car when I went the A C turned on. It's fifty degrees in Sonny in northern California. Sadly, Soccer died on June two thousand one, just after his thirteenth birthday, but Jackie had some kind words for him in an oral history If We Bone published in Texas Monthly magazine. Not every dog is made for Hollywood. It takes a special kind of dog that enjoys it. Soccer wasn't the smartest dog I've ever trained, but he had that willingness to please, and he had a great heart. I mean, he'd walk on water for me. Soccer is buried at the Plain, oh Texas ranch he's shared with Jackie, or the Jackie shared with him. She liked to say in her later years that Soccer really taught her. No, she didn't. Sorry, that's not binding. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more, too much information in just a moment. So we have a dog, but now we need his voice. And this proved harder than you might think. Rick Duffield said that he was sent dozens of voice over demos from casting agencies, but all the actors sounded like, according to him, they were doing Shakespeare, as Duffield said, they didn't stop to think about the dog. Larry Brantley, however, did. The twenty four year old stand up comic was trying to break into acting when he got the call to audition, and he got the gig through what he called the weirdest audition that's ever been or ever will be. And he told the following story to Entertainment Tonight. In he came in with basically no information about the show whatsoever, thinking that he was going to read the scene, you know, like an audition, but it was basically just like a five minute impromptu thing with the dog. Soccer was having a break and Rick Duffield said to Larry, well, watch the dog and just kind of follow along and see what he's doing right now. And Soccer, I guess, was obsessing over this tennis ball. So Larry did a whole impromptu inner monologue of what was going through Soccer's mind as he played with the tennis ball, and Larry thought he was just goofing around, and after a few minutes he grabbed the script and as the producers you know what are we gonna start? And they said, oh no, that was the audition, and this poor guy left thinking, I can't believe I just did five minutes about it and his ball. And then he got the gig, probably because it was closer in spirit to the off the cuff stories Rick Duffield used to do with his family dog that had inspired the show in the first place. Larry tells this great story about being so nervous after the audition that he went up to his uncle's cabin and the Smoky's way in the middle of nowhere, just unlined, and that's where he got the call that he got the gig. And he was on the phone discussing all the finer points of the contract and the production. You know, six days a week, fourteen hours a day for a year, which sounds pretty grueling. Uh, And the producer from whish Bone hangs up, and Larry hears another voice on the line, a thick accent. They're gonna pay you to be a TV show. And Larry didn't realize his uncle was so far out in the sticks that he had a party line, which I mean people probably even know what that is now. It's a line that's shared with multiple people on a block. So when you would get a call of everybody on this mountain's phone would ring and you pick it up and you hear that it wasn't for you, and you hang back up. But this guy was so fascinated by the deal making that he stayed on the line for an hour listening to all the contract details. And then Larry spent another twenty minutes afterwards awkwardly answering questions for this guy, like you know, no, the dogs don't actually talk, and all that kind of stuff. Many of the people who worked on Wishbone would go out of their way to say that the books were the stars of the show. But we must take a moment to salute the show's main human characters, the Talbot's, whose real world lives and desires inspire Wishbones literary flights of fancy. Twelve year old Joe Talbot played by Jordan Wall lived in the fictional town of Oakdale, Texas with his widowed librarian mother Ellen played by Mary Chris Wall, who I believe is no relation. There's also his quirky next door neighbor Wanda, his best friends Sam Kepler and David Barnes, and the bully DeMott. These stories act as a framing device for the literary fantasy sequences because the themes were similar to whatever the sixth grader was going through, which is a really clever way to help young viewers relate to the lessons from these books and embrace them more fully. And now we're at the part of the show that I'm the most excited to talk about. The writing. The head writer was New York based playwright and dancer Stephanie Simpson, and I believe her Dallas based mother taught Rick Duffield's son Joe, and drama class, which I believe is how she wound up with the gig mo. Taking it all the way back to the beginning, How did you first get the job on Wishbone? What was your relationship with Stephanie Simpson? So I am and was already at that point very good friends with Stephanie and her sister, Jeanie. Jeanie Simpson was on many many episodes and terrific actress, and she was she actually was Joan and Jonah Bark, So she got burned at this fake she was Juliette and Romeo and Juliet. She was in a whole bunch of episodes. But we had gone to college essentially together, um different years. And then we were living around the corner from each other in New York, all kind of struggling, as you know, aspiring actors. And for my twenty five birthday, no one remembered my birthday my birthday, and so I called them on that they lived above a jap He's restaurant around the corner for me and so I called them and I said it's my birthday and they went, oh my god, we're so sorry. I said, don't worry, no one remembered. And I said, I'd really like an anchovy with a pizza with anchovies. Uh. And it was that was I was going through a face and where I really liked pizzas with anchovies and uh. And so I had nothing to do with them living above a Japanese restaurant, so they ran over with a pizza with anchovies. I think it actually might have had anchovies and pepperoni, and and it was just the kind of thing they do. And that has nothing to do with them offering me a job on wish Phone. But I just it's just a really wonderful memory. And then anyway, then Stephanie left for what I think she thought would be like a weekend in Dallas to kind of help workshop this idea that was sort of brewing, kind of the the idea before wish Phone, really, and she kind of ended up staying there for a long time, and she she called up and she said, Hey, this is going to become a TV show. Do you want to come down and work on it? And then I came down and I interviewed with Rick Duffield, the executive producer, and then he gave the okay and they hired me to work on the show. I'd been in a production at the time. I was doing musicals. I'd been in the Southeast Asia toward the musical Greece. Um. We played Jakarta, Singapore. Who were you in it? One of the tea birds, you know? I was duty yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. We were canceled in Kuala lumpur Um and then I came back and I was doing South Pacific at a theater called paper Mill Playhouse, and that's when Stephanie called and she said, you want to come down here? So I dropped everything. I said, somebody else will have to play the professor. He only has one solo line and there's nothing like a dame. And then I went down there. So yeah, So I mean I was lucky, fortunate. I don't like lucky. Well, I was lucky. Yeah. Was there a writer's room? It was how many of how big was the crew writing? There were two other staff writers, one of whom was me, and then a couple a few freelancers, So there was no writer's room really in the beginning. There were three or four of us maybe sitting around kind of hashing stuff out, but then we call We eventually sort of went off into our own corners. Um, but Stephanie was supervising and often rewriting. Was there a kind of code of silence among you guys when you hadn't read any of these books? How easy it was it for you to come come to each other and be like, guys, I don't I don't know Silas Marner. Oh my god, Silas Marner. Yeah, and I never read it. I mean, god, I was not as signed don Qyxote. I mean, that would have broken me. It would have broken me. There's a reason I chose the time Machine, which is really kind of fun. And there's a movie right with even me MEU and uh and Rod Taylor right right. So yeah, and so so that was convenient, right, And I think it's like under two hundred pages. It's like, I don't like movies that are longer than a hundred minutes. I don't like Broadway shows with intermissions. I like this whole intermission list thing that's going on. And I don't like my books to be more than two pages. But it was really I really like doing Treasure Island. I pitched that Treasure Island action packed sort uh. And then I did want of Mexican folk Tales, which is a way of just saying like, okay, well, we're just making stuff up now. And then I did uh the Inspector General go go. Yeah, it's great, it reads really fast, it's a play. Yeah. And uh and what was the last one I did? I'm leaving something out. I wrote five of them and uh, it was I'll remember eventually, But yeah, no, I could not. I that would have been too much to do. But cliffs notes, as I learned from this, or's that extra hass in there. It's like Brussels sprouts, just really on it. I just my my my laptop is drenched right now. But so but the cliffs notes, I realized, are pretty damn good. You would have thought I'd been familiar with those beforehand, but I was too lazy for that. Before this project. Even Jordan and I were both talking about on an earlier episode, the Great Illustrative Classics series do you do Amer? Those they were like chat books, but they were like but they were just the kids version of all this stuff. And then for the longest time, I personally labored under the delusion that that was the real book too. Totally imagine my shock and horror when it wasn't. Those things. I think people collect those now. I still have them all at home, so maybe I'm sitting on a gold mine. They're right up next to the old Beanie babies. I'm curious about some of the folk tale ones, like how did those come up? And as far as the pitching process, because you know you've mentioned it was a little bit self directed, and then there's obviously like sort of the bigger, broader strokes of literature that you hit, but like, how did you arrive at like the African myths as a rubric for an episode? Well, so, I mean collectively, but really sort of lead on this score by Stephanie Simpson. And this was you know, twenty five years ago? Is that how long ago it is? Yeah, it's in nineteen ninety six. Where are we in time? You can you can lie to ninety years ago? God? Is it thirty years ago? Yeah, it's almost almost thirty years to go. So, I mean, I would like to think that this was somewhat forward thinking. Stephanie wanted to make sure that this wasn't just Western Cannon, and so she and the writer of that episode, Vincent Brown, if memory serves, I thought it was important to do one around African folk tales, and a Nancy the Spider was the story that they wanted to tell. I wanted to do something that was Hispanic, that was Latino, my mother's Colombian, and I think probably somewhat influenced by doing this in Dallas and Texas. Mexican legends and folk tales seemed like a good subject matter for an episode like that UM. And so what I did is I took two stories, the kind of the origin story of Mexico UM with the t T mex who would eventually become the Aztecs on the shores of Lake Texcoco. And I think it's a symbol in the middle of the of the Mexican flag, right with the eagle and the snake. I'm sort of forgetting this a little bits, a little boggy, but that had to do with the origins or of Mexico. And then the other great symbol of Mexico, our Lady of Guadalupe UM and the marrying apparition there was sort of the other story, and we combined them both so you know, it sounds kind of heavy, and it was. But I have to say it was a really fun challenge taking material like this and saying, all right, how do we make it entertaining and go down easy for a six to eleven year old? And it just was. I mean it was kind of a sort of a dream assignment. I think it's like something that an English professor on acid writing for Massido was signing. It's kind of crazy, right, I mean, let's make the dog one diego the peasant in the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I mean, it's kind of crazy, right, and uh, but it works. It was a great first job to have. I can't believe I wasn't after after that. The next year, I applied to me a writer around Boy Meets World and they didn't. They didn't hire me. I mean, after I'd written a story about the Chichi Max with with the Jack Russell Terrier as an aspect warrior, I couldn't. I couldn't write for Boy Meets Worrel. I am just revisiting the show. I am blown away by how Wishbone didn't talk down to kids at all. I mean, they had some pretty terrifying moments in there with Joan of Arc getting burned at the stake, and in Hunchback and Notre Dame they go down to the gallows. And you mentioned I mean in Red Badge of Courage, Wishbone with the Little Musket. I mean, was it hard to strike the balance between staying true to the source material and also uh knowing your audience. Yeah, I think so, Like, uh, you know, with Romeo and Juliette, there was no suicide, you know. Uh. And I'm trying to think that there were characters. I think for Frankenstein, he was Dr Frankenstein. He was not the monster. I think that that it was decided that that would just be too weird to have him as the monster on would have been really weird, heart hard having the dog through the little girl into the lake too, I mean, and um, yeah, so I think I wish I could remember some of the things that we couldn't do that we wanted to do we couldn't. But yeah, you couldn't have Wishbone. You couldn't have Wishbone kill anyone the dog do that, um, and obviously didn't wanted to die. Um yeah, um, yeah, I can't think of of things that we started down the path. I'm sure there were, I just don't remember was anything shot down? I wish I could remember. I'm sure that stuff was because I saw the metamorphosis in here, and it took me a second to realize it wasn't the Cough Gust story. I thought I had completely memory hold that Andie James Joyce in there. Yeah, Wishbone woke up and found himself transformed into a bug. That would have been great. I love that when you got him in the splitter, you got him the spider costumes, so they costume yeah, um, yeah, So you know nothing that you off the top of your head, you remember. I don't remember, and I'll tell you. I also need to tell you that one thing is I will never forget that the pilot episode, which Stephanie wrote was Oliver Twist, and I remember the PBS executive coming down and they said you're going to meet a television executive and this is we're all gonna have this meeting. Her name was Alice Kahn, and she looked at I think a rough cut of the episode, and then afterwards there was a like an involved discussion about the themes that have been chosen from Oliver Twister really highlight. And then somebody turned to me, I can't remember who was, and said, don't get used to this. This is not normally what happens in TV that a network executive would be talking to you about these things. You suddenly would feel like you're in a seminar and you know, in college or something as opposed to I really think Samantha's harreny to be a shade lighter like like like it wasn't. I mean, it really was very special. My completest streak in the demands that I take a brief moment to break down the author's stats for Wishbone. Eight authors have had more than one of their works featured on the show. Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain each had three of their works adapted for Wishbone. Well Jane Austin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, should Say, Alexander Dumas and Washington Irving had two of their works featured, and Sherlock Holmes is the only character Wishbone played in more than one episode. In addition to the quality of writing on the show, We also have to talk about the quality of the production, which is extra astonishing considering the tight deadline that they were up against. This thing was like shooting SNL on speed with a dog on location on location. Rick Duffiod admits that he freaked out when he got the order for forty episodes of this show due in a year, and he said his first thought, because as part of any good traumatic response, you start right sitalizing and compartmentalizing, his first thought was, well, there's fifty two weeks in a year, maybe we can do this. The problem was, this wasn't Barney with one set on a sound stage, a single group of kids, and a multi camera setup that you could run like a play. Wishbone was both on a studio and on location. Each episode had an A and a B plot, one with Joe and his family shot the present day, and the other drawn from classic literature. Duffield later noted we were basically shooting two different shows at once. Every episode. You couldn't have actors from the Oakdale scenes show up in the fantasy scenes. Why was that? Just because you know, it's like, yeah, kids are dumb, the show is magical. Kids are dubbed. Also Bear in mind. It was a new universe every episode, by which we mean one week they'd be in Victorian England, the next week they'd be with the Aztecs. So every episode required a completely different cast drawn from the local repertory actors, and completely different sets and locations, all of which is to say it was hard to pull off. Shooting these episodes over the course of five days. They worked in a sound stage as well as the Lyrics Studios ten acre back lot in Plano, Texas, outside of Dallas. The sets for Wishbone, I mean, this thing. I cannot tell you how lavish this was. It was a lot of Barney money. Okay, the family I'm whispering a list of them, No one else like the family that ran this thing had a lot of Barney money. Okay, and Barney had been driving everyone crazy. But one of the residual effects of this, right that the zillions of money it made up the back of taxpayers, I mean sort of, well not really. Uh, it's um um that they could fund Wishbone, and thank god, what a great way to use all those extra zillions of dollars. And so we had just on believable sets, and so I think I remember pitching the time Machine because I thought, wow, well we've got the money to build like a whole new world a million years in the future. And they just the production designers, I think Chris Henry and Doug Leonard. I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out. Barry Phillips. Also, they just would build these crazy sets. So sort of in the early stages a c G. I. So there was a woman in Karis Turpin who was really great with green screens when this stuff was fairly new. I think they were blue screens back then, mostly for compositing and creating whole new worlds. But a lot of these sets were truly built from the ground shop And yet understand, we built a whole back lot for the whole contemporary world for those who know Wishphone of the fictional community of Oakdale. So there was a whole neighborhood, you know, built in the suburbs of Dallas on this back lot for all the contemporary scenes, but then for each episode, and episodes are being shot like every ten days. This was an extraordinary amount of material to be producing. We would like Sherlock Holmes, is you know home or in this you know, in the world of the Morlocks Eloy from the time which or you know, I remember for a Treasure Island, I wanted Samantha, one of the main characters in the show, to fall in love with some old barn that in the middle of the episode would get burned down. So they built a barn and burned it down and they would get do crazy stuff like this. I mean, we were spending so much money on this and what was something like forty episodes in a year or something, which the initial order I think the initial order may have been six episodes, but the first season ended up being forty episode so it was no it was tremendous and I and I would I would just hang around on the set because I wasn't really needed on the set unless it was for an episode I had written, but just watching and trying to absorb and sitting in an edit room. I mean, you guys know this. You just learned so much about how not only TV is made, but I know it sounds awfully precious, but you learned how to tell a story when you're watching smart editors at work. And we haven't even gotten to talk about the costumes. Each episode had complete different sets of period costumes for humans and animals, and Wishbone's team won two Emmys for the hundred plus velcrow fastened costumes that they created for the show, which not only had to look good but also be something that Soccer agreed to wear. Remember he has a thing about pants and hats. Costume designer Steven Schoodage created looks that included molded plastic armor for Odysseus, a white beard for ripped friend Winkle, and a plumed hat for Syrano de Bergerac. Although they issued the fake nose, shooting for the first episode began in August, and remember this was in Dallas, So Oliver Twist costumes where shall we say not ideal? Trainer Jackie Captain recalled, I didn't know you could sweat in that many places. That kind of heat was probably our largest challenge because we'd film outdoors one or two days a week and he had to put clothes on a dog in July. He'd look at you like, what are you nuts? I'm not cold. I don't want that on speaking of the dogs thoughts, we should probably add that it was decided early on consciously that viewers could hear Wishbone's thoughts, but his lips would not be moving because c g I effects were at that point in their infancy and very expensive. We never had the dog's lips move. I think that was a decision that that would have been too creepy, even though it kind of worked for Babe the movie when Babe the Movie came out not long afterwards. But for Babe at Work, I think for the animal's lips to move because the movie there was something ominous about it, right if I remember that correctly, for which would have been too creepy. So it was it worked better for it to be his internal monologue. And after all, in his dream life he's heard by the other characters, but that's his fantasy, that's his dream. What was the Mr Ed? Didn't they do the didn't they do peanut butter for his what Jordan's this is all you for? Mr? Ed? They just slathered his his his labia with Peter butter, and then they would just cut to this poor horse trying to choke down this peanut butter, and they'd be like, Oh, that's how he's talking. You know, I'm glad we got Mr Ed in here. Mr Edin wishbone The high culture and low culture of talking animal shows. Given the scope of production, some of the actors admitted that they had a tough time they were remembering this was all for a Jack Russell Terrier. Actor Matthew Thompson explained to you Texas Monthly. I mean, this incredible costume on this incredible set, with this interesting dialogue, working with his cracker Jack crew, and I turned to my scene partner and it's a Jack Russell Terrier in a costume. But once you accepted that much in the same way you ruefully accepted Santa Claus is real, then you just treated Soccer like another actor. And I will tell you that I don't think I was gonna say, like, does this sound patronizing, It's not. It's a truth. Is when you shoot a show in a place like Dallas, and I just finished shooting something for many seasons in Detroit, it's like, look, they're great. Crew was everywhere. But I think they were so excited to have a show in Dallas, especially one that was produced with the real money that I mean, people just threw themselves into this like you wouldn't believe. And the actors there were plenty of good actors in Dallas who and I'm not kidding here. You know who had been on like Walker, Texas Ranger was big at the time. I think there might have been one other show in Dallas. But this is a real gift to them, especially the actors who were in the fantasy sequences, because right, each episode was divided between the contemporary world of wish Phone and the fantasy sequences. So they were essentially a repertory company. And you know, one week they might be playing a French nobleman in Joan of Arc and then the next week, you know, playing a pirate and Treasure Island, or you know, somebody in the Count of Money Cristo or I mean it was I mean, I think it was kind of a dream job for a lot of people. Did you ever meet Chuck Norris? I sat across from Chuck Norris at Race Yourself Mary Poppins. I was at Mary Poppins on Broadway, and Chuck Norris was right across the aisle from me, and he is, you know, he's he's compact, and he was with his wife and a couple of kids. I don't think Chuck had been like, please, honey, can we go to Mary Boffins, Like I think they're kids I'm guessing that their kids, but it could have been maybe Chuck Norris loves Mary Poppins. Maybe he's you know, I'm sure he's gone down a chimney or two on that series. I'm sure, yeah, But I don't think he really liked it. I don't. Yeah. And you know, they do this amazing thing where the Dick van Dyke character like actually walked up the procemium and I thought, Chuck Norris has got to be impressed. He was like walked up the side the procemium. It was like more impressive than when Fredda Stair dances around the bull room, right and like the ceiling in the walls. But that was a rotating thing. This is this is the theater was not rotating, and Chuck Norris was like, uh, now, I'd rather be a cats or whatever. I mean, it does seem like more of a Cats guy. I mean, that's why you never stopped by that. Maybe that's why you never stopped by the set of Wishbone. He never did. He never did. I think the Chuck Norris is probably more of a phantom god because the handle that he's crashing down, I mean that gets really scary as you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, Wishbone premiered on PBS on October, and the fifty total episodes aired over the course of two seasons. The show won four Daytime Emmy's, two for the costumes, one for titles, one for set design, honors from the Television Critics Association, and a peep Audio Award that Rick Duffield accepted on behalf of Wishbone, of whom he said, given the chance, he'd like to bury it in the backyard with all of his other prized possessions and bodies. His zombie is right away that the show you like that? Wow, I'm just pitching. I'm pitching Wishbone episodes. Did they do the Vincent Bugliosi book The Helter Skelter? You put him in like a buckskin shirt talking about piggis uh. Duffield had received many letters from young children, parents, and teachers. He later said, we were tickled at so many college students like the show. Some of them would write us later thank you notes for helping them pass freshman lip class. Producers sent the voice of Wishbone Brantley on the press tour where he encountered college kids and young married couples with no kids who were fans. He said, I remember meeting an entire retirement community in a suburb of Chicago. They bust them in and they were all fans of the show. It was amazing to me. Speaking of Wishbone tours, wishone went on a mall tour of the United States between the first or second season, not unlike Debbie Gibson in the eighties, where he greeted his fans from a giant red armchair. According to an article in People magazine with the incredible headline reign of Terrier, that's good stuff. Yeah, is that Tom? I think so? M hm, shouts Tom Guiotto, who I guarantee doesn't listen to podcasts soccer. The dog flew first class, stayed in four star hotels, and had handlers who referred to him as the President. This would result in hilarious, presumably hilarious, I think it's hilarious, hilarious scenarios When they would take him outside to do his business, the handlers would speak into their headsets, we've lost the president. When he would, for example, go behind a bush or tree. And then when he reappeared, there would be relieved cries of we have eyes of the President, found the President. Their appearance at the Ball of America drew seven thousand people, a bigger crowd than the opening of Planet Hollywood, which had actual a list Hollywood celebrities, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwartzenegger. None of them could hold a candle to Wishbone. MO, what was it like when the show premiered, Because on your mobiituarious podcast you interview some Wishbones super fans, and I was wondering at what point it became apparent that this show was making a big impact outside of the realm of just children's television. You know, it started probably pretty soon after the show premiered. I don't remember much merchandizing at all. So I had a Wishbone T shirt that was just the crew for the company, and I remember that I would have people come up to me, mothers usually and say this is the only show I'll let my kid watch. That kind of a thing. So I noticed that pretty early on Stephanie had designed the show. She was really scrupulous about it not dating, so there were no episodes about the kids excited about whatever was going on in pop culture at the time, Like they don't talk about like, um, handsome as that was that in the mid nineties. They don't talk about whatever was like in the nineties. Um, there weren't any really gadgets things like that, so the show didn't date. And then I started when I was on The Daily Show. Actually, I remember one of the first things I'm just remembering this that John Stewart said to me was his mother was a teacher, I think, and he said, he loves that you wrote for Wishbone, and she loves that because teachers he used it. So that was I remember that. Um, And then realizing that this thing that we had, you know, anything good as hard, that we had worked so hard on and so earnestly on, had kind of not a hip appeal but had a more extensive appeal than I realized. And then when I gave this speech at Sarah Lawrence College, you know, and I was kind of ticking through my own history and I was kind of taken aback at the response at Wishbone. God, so there's like a real reservoir of goodwill, a real depth of affection for it. And I think it's probab will believe because you know, and this is I think what we wanted is we were the introduction. I think that show was the introduction for many people to these great works of literature. And I did actually, I know it was always a joke with us even back then, but I did have people come up to me and say, you know, I only passed this exam because I seen the Wishbone episode that was always fun. Yeah, well seriously about me, I know, for Alex and myself, I mean, you did introduce us to all sorts of stories that really we keep close to our hearts. And you know, we're both avid readers, and you know, we're we're writers for a living, and that's a huge part of our own store, in our own history. And there is a huge sense of gratitude towards you and your your friends and colleagues for that gift. I mean, I think there was. I think it was in your episode you said, yeah, there are a lot of shows that taught kids how to read, but very few that taught kids why. And I think that really gets to the heart of it for me, at least, tremendous mat gratitude. Well, I appreciate that. And listen and you know, and and one of the things is when I think about it, taking great books and adapting them for kids for a dog, but in certain time constraints. I mean, it's just a great writer's exercise. I mean it just is to have to do that. And also learning that a book like a Don Quixote or like Homer's Odyssey has so much going on and having to like select one theme. You know, each of these books could have supported fifty different episodes of Wishbone. I guess one of one of the things it taught me is how to make choices and to zero in on something and be really specific in writing. Also, listen, as I said, it was a great first job to have. It's a great it was almost really unrealistically. So yeah, getting from the wonderful legacy and the valedictory part. Can we touch a little bit on when you maybe new things were going the writing was on the wall, because I mean even Good Cop, Bad Cop that right there. Yeah, I'm here, I'm not. Now let's talk about the worst part of your history now, um no, I you mentioned a little bit that money was flush from from Barney and then once maybe the I don't know what the accounting department it's PBS looked like. But I'm imagining they've got the line sheet at the end of the year and said, you're spending what how much on velcro costumes? So I left after the forty episodes, and there were only eight episodes after that. I left to move to l A, you wrote off triumphantly, Yes, exactly. I took off right with the explosion behind me. I went up to l A. And so I wasn't around for the next eight episodes. I think that the second season lasted eight episodes. I promise you. If I knew, I would tell you. But all I know is that they didn't order more beyond that, and it may have been because it was so expensive, to which I say, thank god they didn't catch on sooner that they just allowed those episodes to kind of be as pristine as they are. But yeah, so I wasn't around for a dramatic sort of cancelation notice, and I know very little about kind of how that went down. So now we get to the mystery portion of this program, which is why did wishbone the show? It was beloved by fans and critics alike, only last for a season and a half. Well, it sounds like it was a two pronged problem. As we taked so earlier, it was a complex and relatively costly production, and it was greenlit at a rare time when there was money in children's public television thanks to the success of Barney, and as a result, people with the purse strings were more willing to take risks. But that only lasts so long. The crucial difference between Barney and Wishbone was that the former had the bonus of launching a toy empire, whereas the powers that be felt that there was quote limited marketing potential for Wishbone and executive at kenn Toys. Once you used the term toy yettic to Steven Spielberg to describe et and apparently Wishbone was not toy yetic. That's a gross They couldn't have taken some some toy etic license. It's with him doing anything busy for another week. The producers could have used the merchandising income to finance what was, as we said earlier, a very complicated production. Duffield later said up the show's downfall, it was money. We just couldn't finance it. PBS couldn't come up with the money we couldn't come up with the money, and the way PBS rolled Wishbone out could have also hurt the show. The network wanted this to be a daily show, and all forty episodes for the first season aired over nine months between March and November. And compare that to pbss forty episode first season rollout of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, which made it through fifteen months. So in short, PBS burned through the episodes quickly, which was a disservice to such a labor intensive, meticulous show. It really should have been a weekly show like Mr. Rogers and allowed to build an audience and grow. They didn't even get renewed for a full second season, just a truncated ten episode run, plus a full length movie called Dog Days of the West, based on the Oh Henry short story Heart of the West. And it was just after a month long shoot in Santa Fe wrapped in late nine seven that Duffield learned that the show was not coming back and the film would be Wishbone Swan Song and unfortunately, adding sort of insult to injury, they still had some contemporary scenes to shoot for the movie at a carnival, so Duffield took this as this big moment to address the cast and crew and thank everyone, and voice of Wishbone Larry Brantley recalled him saying, we're not coming back. We tried to find the money, We did everything we could. I want you to remember this. You weren't just a part of something great. You were part of something important. They're going to remember the stories that you told and the way you told them. The final episode of Wishbone aired on December five, almost years ago exactly. And Rick Duffield, that's a quote that makes me want to give him a big old hug. He said, it was very sad for me. You don't want to fire your best friends. I felt responsible for it, and I felt like I failed. I loved all these people, I still do so much. I felt like I was hurting my own family, like I was letting them down, and it really got to me. But thankfully, or maybe thankfully, Wishbone was granted a belated reprieve. Recently, there was some news back in that there's going to be a Wishbone reboot movie by the Fairly Brothers or Peter Fairley. Mo I was what you think about that? And if you have any intel on well, I know it's yeah, it's by that. I think they they So the headline was from the makers of Green Book, and I kept thinking, it's the dog going to be in the ma hershaw Alle role or in the Bigo Mortenson role. I mean, like so anyway, I don't know, I know nothing about it, um about the movie, but hey, listen it think it could be brought back at the same caliber. I think that would be a great thing. And if if the show, um, if the series, the TV series, would be great if they brought that back in some way. You said, I think this might have been in a really beautiful commencement speech you gave. It's Sarah Lawrence a few years back, where when you were living in Texas you were intrigued, at least in the in the suburbs around Dallas because there wasn't much acknowledgement of the past. I think were your words and that really sparked something for you. I wanted to ask you you more about that. That really seemed to send you on a on a journey. Well, you know, when I lived in I was living in Plano, Texas, and nothing against the people plain oh, but it was just sort of one sort of Pointe House after another, like a very McMansion eye and it was kind of sterile, and it felt like anything that was like pre Watergate would qualify sort of as like an historic monument or something. I mean, everything was so new. I used to go to the Albertson's there and it was so overly air conditioned, and it felt like that scene at the end of the hurt Locker, Like I go down the curial aisle and it was just like, why they're like thirty five different brands of like you know, frosted flakes or something. There was something kind of I don't know, sort of soulless about it. And so then from then I said, you know, I want to know wherever I live, who lived here before me, what happened in this place before me, just to get a sense of, I don't know, rooted nous or whatever. And so then I began this thing. I just kept stopping wherever I was and looking at historic markers. Ohio has a really great State Historical Association. They have like a little kind of brown little roadside signs everywhere, and so whenever I'm in Ohio, I'm stopping the car a lot to read them. And so I just started going around and visiting, and somehow that got me onto visiting, you know, the homes and grave sites of past presidents, like the obscure ones, the ones between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. You usually have a lot of facial hair. A couple of them are knocked off, you know, I mean, one by an anarchist, the other by an a grieved office seeker. And I would find that if I visited these homes and these sites, it was not only interesting, but the docents the people, which is a very NPR word, I realized, but the people that would work there were so committed to them. So I like, I ended up in Indianapolis visiting the home of Benjamin Harrison, which is a very nice home on Delaware Avenue, UM, and I met this woman who was decked out in a Victorian gown, who had been volunteering there for twenty two years. And so I just was really sort of compelled by these stories and and these sites, this kind of marginalized history, and that sort of set me on my next on my on my next path, and sort of frankly kind of got me onto TV by studying all these historical figures and doing the research and telling that story and presenting it to people. What was it like doing this Wishbone episode, doing that for your own paths and your own history. Oh for you, Yeah, it was emotional. It was emotional because I really because I really um that job, and Stephanie Simpson in particular, I really considered sort of mentoring experiences and teaching me kind of how to work hard, also how to push through when something doesn't feel like it's working, when something's not coming together. You know that when you walk through a store or mold your head up. I write, like carouself, that experience of instead of going it's not working or just handing and you know which, just like really bearing down and pushing through until something works. And that's kind of where I learned that how to do that and how satisfying that is, you know, that difference between when something is sort of ninety five percent done and when it's really done and uh yeah, and how satisfying it can be to like, you know, write something that holds together and tells the story well. So really to be able to interview her about that and Jackie Captain about the dog, about soccer Um, and also to thank them was emotional for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because really I didn't know what I was doing beforehand. I didn't you know, you can have a fancy education, expensive education like I did and not know what you're doing. Well before we say goodbye, high gol, I know there was a quote from an article that you wanted to share. This is an article from two thousand fifteen written at the Toast, my beloved site that has since gone under the writer's name is Abby Fenber, and she is the whole gist of the piece, is imagining the pitch meeting for Wishbone, and thanks to move for taking the time. We know that it didn't go down like this, but I'd like to go out with a line from this piece that she wrote. Wishbone's eyes are fathomless pools of knowledge, reflecting all the pathos of great literature, the suffering and beauty of humanity, bled onto the page and breathed in by generations of readers, connecting them us in an unspoken communion of shared loneliness that both celebrates and eases our pain. This is where we see that books do more than describe our human condition, by shaping our minds and drawing us ever closer together they create it. You know Jack Russell's terriers eyes, Yes, yes, Is that what Peter Graabrier wrote that song about. Oh well, thank you so much for taking the time. Oh this has been just such a blast. Thank you guys. Oh man, this was such a fun episode. Thank you folks for taking the time. Thank you moll Rock for taking the time. Thank you Jordan for doing most of it. I'm Alex Hegel, I'm Jordan run Talg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runt Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalg and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio, a Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M