A
half-hour-long show, "
Wishbone" stars
Soccer the
Jack Russell Terrier as a canine
bibliophile named
Wishbone (voice-over by
Larry Brantley).
His
family, teenager
Joe Talbot (
Jordan Wall) and his mother
Ellen (
Mary Chris Wall, who has appeared in the
soap opera "
The Bold and the Beautiful" and the feature film
Inspector Gadget), lives in the small town of
Oakdale, a friendly place where everybody knows each other.
Joe's friends
David Barnes (
Adam Springfield) and
Samantha Kepler (
Christie Abbott) live in his neighborhood and spend a lot of time with him and
Wishbone, going on
adventures and helping out in their
community.
Ellen is a librarian at their local
library and in her spare time enjoys the
friendship of
next-door neighbor Wanda Gilmore (
Angee Hughes). Wanda is an eccentric
tree-hugger who runs the
Oakdale Chronicle and constantly wars with
Wishbone over his digging up her yard and disturbing her
plastic flamingoes.
While
Wishbone accompanies
Joe and the gang on their adventures, he
daydreams himself into characters in novels, providing a parallel plot in which he tells the stories of
Homer,
Alexandre Dumas,
Mark Twain, and many others. As he becomes characters such as
Ichabod Crane and
Cyrano de Bergerac,
Wishbone teaches kids about issues like
loyalty,
courage, and
wisdom while throwing in amusing jokes and antics of his own.
At the end of each show,
Wishbone and the people who produce the show tell about how something in the episode was done, like
sound effects or
camera tricks, or what some concept in the episode means, like the Greek word
epithet.
The show is very entertaining for kids and also gets them to appreciate
literary works and
family values. Over the years, it has won the following
awards:
Episodes of "
Wishbone" can be seen on
PBS; check your
local listings.