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Wishbone
1995 · TV series · 28 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Rick Duffield
ActionAdventureComedyKidsScience FictionFantasy
Wishbone is a children's television show. The show's title character is a Jack Russell Terrier of the same name. Wishbone lives with his owner Joe Talbot in the fictional modern town of Oakdale, Texas. He daydreams about being the lead character of stories from classic literature He was known as "the little dog with a big imagination". Only the viewers and the characters in his daydreams can hear Wishbone speak. The characters from his daydreams see Wishbone as whatever famous character he is currently portraying and not as a dog.
4 positive1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Wishbone was a good show, but I think it occupies a different niche. Wishbone was about adapting the classics, and each episode was more of a production vs Reading Rainbow, which was formatted more to introduce kids to contemporary age-appropriate reading by focusing on picture books and excursions to thematically connected places.
The only downside is that Wishbone holds up better to a modern rewatch in comparison, as opposed to how RR is very much of its time. But that's ok, too; someone needs to inspire kids to be adventurous with their reading so that they can go out and find the next classics.
I genuinely liked it even though I could read fine. It was an excuse to use the tv when I might not have a good reason to use it instead of someone else otherwise and I enjoyed the content well enough even if I was a couple years older than the intended audience. The public broadcasting shows of that era were weirdly good imo, with Mr Rogers and Shirley Lewis doing puppets, but wholesome too.
Ghost Writer was ahead of its time and deserves a post of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter_(1992_TV_series)
> The series revolves around a multiethnic group of friends from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries as a team of youth detectives with the help of a ghost named Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter can communicate with children only by manipulating whatever text and letters he can find and using them to form words and sentences.
> Ghostwriter producer and writer Kermit Frazier revealed in a 2010 interview that Ghostwriter was a runaway slave during the American Civil War. He taught other slaves how to read and write and was killed by slave catchers and their dogs. His spirit was kept in the book that Jamal discovers and opens in the pilot episode, freeing the ghost.
Wishbone has costumes and a dog for your dramatic re-enactments of books with a dog actor in the lead role. This is crazy town, and I’m here for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_(TV_series)
I loved Wishbone as a kid precisely for that reason; despite the premise being pretty bizarre (telling a classic story but make the main character a dog), even as a kid I always thought it was cool how little they "talked-down" to me.
I remember the Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde episode unambiguously kills off Jekyll at the end of the episode, and it genuinely kind of disturbed me a bit when I was a little kid, but in a good way.
I remember loving the "Wishbone" shows on PBS as a kid... this reminds me of that but 100x better (kids are reading along with the movie, not having the movie replace the book). Love it!
Exactly.
This article repeats many of the exact same complaints that my parents and my friends' parents had about the Wishbone[0] books (not the TV series). Fortunately, reading kid-friendly adaptations of classics neither rotted my brain nor destroyed my interest in the subject matter, and I remain an avid reader today.
My first exposure to Greek mythology came from (I kid you not) a reader in school[1]. It was probably intended for a 4th grade reading level. If anything, this only enhanced my interest in the matter - I read the entire D’Aulaires collection shortly afterward, studied Latin in high school, and still know many of the stories by heart.
I actually read the entire Percy Jackson series recently. It's a quick read for any adult, and like many kids' cartoons from the 70s, it's filled with jokes and references that only an adult can appreciate[2]. The writing quality is a little lower than Harry Potter, but if I may, I never thought Rowling was a stellar writer anyway (her talent is in plot development).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_%28TV_series%29
[1] Do they still even have these anymore? They were basically consumable workbooks that had stories that you were reading as you practice spelling, grammar, etc.
[2] I actually am surprised in some sense that children enjoy the books, because to me, it seems like much of the humor would fall completely flat without a solid understanding of the stories that Riordan is adapting. Apparently he manages to make it work, but I would say that his writing is about as adult-friendly/adult-oriented as the first few books in the Harry Potter series. (As opposed to the last couple of books, which are definitely intended for a slightly older audience, and contain much darker elements).