Wishbone: Death of a Working Dog | Reviving a Mobit

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 played leading roles in Hollywood.

Look there's Tuto, where do you come from from?

Kansas's most courageous Cairn.

Terrier Who's come to take us to dog?

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?

Was the matter?

Gentlemen?

Afraid your team might get beat by a dog?

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.

Believe me it was.

Nothing, Hey, whishbird, Let's have some meat.

Look?

Did I hear you say?

Me?

Love?

That dog's real name was soccer now as Wishbone, he didn't just beg for treats.

Soccer was a total action hero dog. Soccer was winning battles and getting knighted and solving mysteries.

Look closely, the clues could be anywhere.

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.

Robin Hood actual of us.

So romancing like Shakespeare's Romeo.

With Love's like wings, did I or perch these walls?

And inspired by Jules Vern digging deep, going where no dog or man had gone before, proof.

That we are on the right track, on one to the Sun, God of the Eye.

For the show's target audience of six to eleven year olds, Soccer became a tween idol.

I have pictures of people waiting in line two blocks long just to see this dog.

What's the story, Wishbone? What's this?

Your dreaming?

Enough such?

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.

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.

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.

It totally was.

So much went into this show to make it a hit, but none of it would have worked without the top dog.

I think every movie star has eyes that tell stories, and Soccer had the most amazing dog eyes.

He was a magic little creature man, he really was. He looked so good on camera.

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.

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 what was Wishbone about. Well, let's have some fans who grew up with the show explain.

So it was called Wishbone, and it was this little dog, Jack Russell Terrier.

Wishbone has a love for classic literature.

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.

Reason why I ever passed in English class because I did not do the reading.

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 like Treasure Island, and epic poem like Homer's Odyssey in African folk tale like Anansi the Spider.

Wishbone read a lot.

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, but the story of the dog who played Wishbone begins with an animal trainer named Jackie Captain. Hello Jackie, Yes, it's Moe.

Oh my goodnessistant so long.

It's been more than twenty five years.

Jackie's been living off the grid way up in Haynes, Alaska. You're not easy to get a hold of.

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.

Do you think the bears know your background with animals and that they kind of respect it?

Well, I've kind of told them, Look, we're on common ground here. You leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.

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.

I went to work for him, and that was probably the best experience I had learning how to do dogs for motion picture.

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 Benji movies.

Come on, nudget, Benji, Please, come on, come on, nudget, nudget.

Good kid, Look here, feet up, stay a spe And.

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.

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.

Just wanted to pet him.

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.

I only have one dog left, which is really weird for me. I have the Beverly Hills Chihuahua Rosa.

Oh my gosh, and remember Rosa. There's nothing wrong with being different.

Different.

It is just a nice way of saying run.

Yeah. She's twelve now, she only weighs three pounds.

She's the Beverly Hills Chihuaba and she's living in Haines, Alaska, surrounded by grizzlies.

How's that working out?

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.

Oh my god.

But Jackie, I know you're retired, but this just screams out for a Beverly Hills Chihuaba sequel, I mean, escape to Alaska.

I know it does, doesn't it. I like that idea.

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.

I said, that is the cutest pubby I've ever seen.

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.

Yeah, he didn't do much at all until he did Wishbone and he was six or seven.

I think six or seven in dog years.

You do the math.

He was getting up there has been without ever having.

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.

In nineteen ninety three, auditions for the lead role in Wishbone were announced, Butackie was tied up on another project.

I was in Montana working on River Wild.

And she wasn't particularly interested.

I'm tied up on a feature movie.

Here, you know, sidebar. I loved the River Wild, an action adventure starring a buff Meryl Streep opposite an evil Kevin Bacon.

Woo woo woo.

You the dog expended who right, now who, I think I'll.

Go oh oo oo oo.

The dog who.

But the Wishbone team liked Soccer's look and prevailed on Jackie to bring him in for an audition, and Soccer wowed them.

He wasn't just charming, he.

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.

Actually, when I first was asked to audition to be the voice of Wishbone, I had no idea what the show was.

That became the job of stand up comic and voiceover actor Larry Brantley.

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.

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.

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 would never go with anybody else. He'd always been.

With me, so you had to be there.

Well.

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.

And in fact, he did dance jigs. I mean he did kind of every behavior.

Really.

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?

Well?

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.

Did you ever think you'd end up writing for a dog?

No?

I didn't, No, I did not.

That's my friend Stephanie Simpson. She was Wishbone's supervising producer, story editor, and head writer.

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 life that you were not aware of.

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. 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.

We got volleyball, any games we got.

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 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.

Who is her mother?

Her mother is the lady of the house?

Oh, Lady of the Ooh is she a capulate?

Who is that gentleman? His name is Romeo?

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.

You have a go if you sell this dog?

He couldn't say no.

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 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.

Sam. Sorry, I know how much you liked Rosie.

And so you have to deal with some kind of loss.

I'm glad she's okay.

I mean, she really needed to get home.

For me.

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?

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.

With essays, it's a lot of essays.

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.

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.

Of the book. The idea of the book.

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 and why they're doing them.

If LeVar Burton's show Reading Rainbow was teaching kids how to read, Wishbone was showing kids why great books matter.

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 reading don Quixote. That would be super sad for him.

That's a work that's so sprawling, many ideas there.

Its like so long to read it, mo, and I had, you know, maybe three days.

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.

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.

Do you really think it's possible.

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.

You were great, but I didn't do the impossible.

I'm not going down in history or anything.

I'm not extraordinary. Hey, you don't have to perform impossible feats to be extraordinary.

Just live your life. Life is an ongoing adventure.

But it was the act of trying that matters.

I've told people that writing for the show was like an assignment from an English professor on Assey.

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.

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 who can hear him.

Mister Darcy, we should be a darling and escorted me to the punch bow.

Yes, of course, excuse us, miss Mega the minute.

Sorry.

Part of what was so what was so well immediately funny was that in the fantasy sequences that Wishbone was treated as a human.

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. 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.

People love the show so much, you know.

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.

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, 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

Thank you.

Mo.

Well, I'm I'm so grateful to hear you say that, because I was under a lot of pressure and it was difficult.

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.

Yeah.

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 I'm going to get emotional.

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 sheer love of the story and the belief that other people needed to fall in love with it too.

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.

Wish Mode is.

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.

You're going to get there.

That's where the leap will happen.

Right.

I still remember how I felt finishing the first episode I wrote for Wishbone, based on HG. Wells's The Time.

Machine System destination on Time on New In case of emergency, keep your heads and arms inside the vehicle, oh stop.

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 and so I like my New Year's Eves to be promising and not frivolous to be.

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.

How will you remember Soccer? Oh?

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 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.

Be grateful to him.

I am grateful to him and his beautiful brown eyes.

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 hattie sported as Robinhood Wishbone. Superfans like Claire Conley vividly

The challenge is sizing down human clothes and making them actually fit a dog.

Dogs have a different anatomy than than humans, as is obvious, and.

Of course too, we have to we have to make things that he will wear well.

For Ivanhoe, he was wearing chain mail. Dogs don't wear chain mail ordinarily.

Well, they don't wear pants either.

That's soccer's trainer, Jackie Captain again, Mark Twain.

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.

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.

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 walk on water for me.

Well you say he'd walk on water for you. But to be fair, he didn't really like water, did he.

No, he didn't.

Okay, it's a bit I don't like water.

Most of the water work.

Including an epic scene from the Odyssey episode, was handled by a stunt dog named Phoebe Daily. Yes, there were other dogs.

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.

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?

Oh, Slugger, he was so cute. He's such a sweet dog. I forgot about Slugger.

Sorry, Slugger, but rest assured. Soccer was in almost every scene.

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 other actor appeared as if he really was taking in what they were saying.

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.

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 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.

Ready flip. The show debuted on October ninth, nineteen ninety five, and soon developed a with all due respect to Kujo rapid following.

As you know, Wishbone is the star of the mega.

Popular, award winning children's show on PBS Design to introduce kids to literature.

I give you once again the Wishbone super fans.

What more could you ask for?

It's the perfect kid show. You got a cute dog, you got education.

I remember my first exposure to like William Shakespeare was from this frickin' dog. We were just very wishbun obsessed in my house.

Growing up outside Albany, New York. Aaron McDonough was a loyal viewer.

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.

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.

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.

You're kidding.

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.

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.

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.

So what happened after Wishbone ended? What did soccer do?

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 time to retire because he did his job. He never let me down, he never quit me, And to me, that's the ultimate.

Soccer died on June twenty sixth two thousand and one. He was thirteen.

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.

What kind of a reaction did his death get.

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. 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.

Well.

I apologize for being so hard to get a hold of it. You know, when you retire, you become very irresponsible.

Good for you.

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 television was on a show where so much love went into the final product. And I think of Soccer's gorgeous face.

It's this really cute show that I feel like too few people know about.

At this point, the reason I have all these books is in my fault.

It's this guy's fault.

Why all the books? What happened?

What's the story Wishbone?

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.

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 Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This