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

Jordan and Alex welcome special guest Mo Rocca to discuss his time writing for the beloved PBS classic about a highly literate little dog with a big imagination. You'll learn about the real-life Jack Russell who inspired the titular character, the Herculean efforts that went into costuming this show, the painstaking process of rewriting classic literature for a dog, and the infuriating reasons why this Peabody-winning show was canceled at the top of its game. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.

(00:09):
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

(00:30):
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

(00:52):
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

(01:14):
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,

(01:37):
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

(01:58):
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

(02:19):
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

(02:41):
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

(03:01):
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

(03:24):
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

(03:45):
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

(04:08):
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

(04:28):
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

(04:48):
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

(05:10):
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,

(05:30):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:12):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:54):
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

(07:15):
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

(07:37):
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

(07:58):
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

(08:19):
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

(08:42):
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

(09:02):
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

(09:23):
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

(09:45):
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

(10:06):
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,

(10:26):
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,

(10:46):
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,

(11:08):
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,

(11:29):
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

(11:53):
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

(12:17):
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

(12:39):
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,

(13:00):
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.

(13:24):
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

(13:45):
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

(14:06):
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

(14:26):
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

(14:47):
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

(15:10):
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

(15:33):
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

(15:54):
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

(16:16):
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.

(16:37):
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

(17:00):
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,

(17:21):
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,

(17:43):
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,

(18:03):
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

(18:24):
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.

(18:46):
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

(19:07):
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,

(19:29):
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

(19:53):
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

(20:14):
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

(20:34):
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

(20:55):
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

(21:15):
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

(21:37):
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

(21:58):
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

(22:19):
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

(22:41):
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

(23:03):
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

(23:26):
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

(23:49):
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

(24:10):
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

(24:31):
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

(24:55):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:37):
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

(26:02):
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

(26:22):
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,

(26:44):
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

(27:07):
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

(27:27):
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

(27:49):
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

(28:10):
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,

(28:30):
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

(28:50):
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

(29:11):
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

(29:32):
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

(29:55):
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

(30:15):
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

(30:37):
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,

(30:58):
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

(31:19):
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

(31:39):
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

(32:02):
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

(32:22):
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,

(32:42):
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

(33:03):
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

(33:23):
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

(33:43):
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,

(34:04):
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.

(34:27):
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

(34:49):
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

(35:10):
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

(35:32):
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

(35:53):
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.

(36:13):
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,

(36:35):
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

(36:57):
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,

(37:19):
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,

(37:40):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:23):
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

(38:44):
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

(39:06):
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

(39:28):
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

(39:48):
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

(40:11):
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

(40:31):
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

(40:52):
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

(41:13):
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

(41:36):
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

(41:56):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:38):
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.

(42:59):
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.

(43:21):
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,

(43:44):
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

(44:05):
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

(44:28):
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

(44:48):
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

(45:10):
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

(45:31):
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

(45:53):
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

(46:14):
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,

(46:35):
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

(46:56):
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,

(47:19):
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

(47:42):
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

(48:02):
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

(48:27):
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.

(48:48):
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

(49:11):
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,

(49:33):
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

(49:55):
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

(50:18):
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

(50:40):
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

(51:02):
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

(51:25):
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,

(51:46):
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

(52:07):
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

(52:29):
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.

(52:50):
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

(53:10):
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

(53:32):
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

(53:54):
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

(54:20):
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

(54:42):
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

(55:03):
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

(55:25):
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

(55:46):
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.

(56:07):
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

(56:28):
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

(56:49):
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

(57:11):
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,

(57:32):
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,

(57:56):
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

(58:17):
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

(58:39):
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,

(59:01):
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,

(59:22):
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

(59:45):
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

(01:00:05):
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

(01:00:30):
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

(01:00:54):
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

(01:01:15):
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

(01:01:36):
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.

(01:01:57):
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

(01:02:21):
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

(01:02:43):
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