Before he chased Sherlock Holmes through foggy alleys on his eponymous PBS children’s series, Wishbone was just a Jack Russell terrier, whose actual name was Soccer and who lived in a Dallas ZIP code. For a generation of kids who came home from school in the mid-to-late ’90s, that pointy-eared pup wasn’t just a talking dog beamed in from a North Texas film set. He was ours. Local, homegrown and a North Texas original wearing a tiny ruff collar and quoting Charles Dickens.
Now, 30 years after the show first aired, the original creative team is pulling back the curtain. “What’s the Story, Wishbone?” — directed and produced by Joey Stewart, who also served as an assistant director on the original series, with producers Betty Buckley and Larry Brantley — is an affectionate, slightly chaotic, overdue love letter to a show that taught millions of children that great literature wasn’t homework. It was an adventure.
And the documentary makes one thing gloriously clear: this magic was made right here.
A career built in the backyard
Larry Brantley, the voice of Wishbone himself, landed in Dallas in January 1993 with a handful of high school friends and a two-year plan: build a resume, then bolt for Los Angeles. The dream was always somewhere else.
“That plan got derailed immediately when I landed this TV series in North Texas,” he recalls. “North Texas gave me a career.”
He’s still a little awed by what he found when he got here.
“The cast and crew were huge, far bigger than any other children’s or family television show,” Brantley says. “You realize what an incredibly diverse and talented group of people we have here in North Texas.”
He wasn’t the only production member expecting to pack his bags, either. Director Joey Stewart figured the film industry simply began and ended with California. Instead, he discovered a thriving scene hiding in plain sight.
“I didn’t know the film industry had such a big community here,” Stewart tells us.
That community carried him through locally shot productions of “JFK,” and “Walker, Texas Ranger,” and eventually Dallas filmmaker David Lowery’s “The Old Man & the Gun.”
The story repeats itself like a refrain. Betty Buckley — Emmy and Peabody-winning producer, founder of Women in Film Dallas — splits her time with the Hill Country now, but she’s clear about where she belongs.
“My roots in my home are in Dallas,” she says. “It’s an amazing creative community.”
That’s the quiet thesis of the whole enterprise. Wishbone wasn’t an accident of geography; he was the product of a deep, generous and often underrated talent pool that North Texas had been cultivating all along.
Never write down to kids
What made the show extraordinary wasn’t just the dog in costume, as charming as that was. It was the conviction behind it. The idea came from creator Rick Duffield, who framed it with a simple, radical question. Kids, he reasoned, often see themselves as a very small part of a very big world, but the show, at Duffield’s urging, begged to make children the “hero in their own story.”
Showrunner Stephanie Simpson set the rule that governed everything: “We will never write down to kids.” That meant real Shakespeare, real Homer, real Dickens — not a watered-down imitation. Dallas-based talent wrangler Rody Kent stacked the cast with classically trained theatre actors who could handle the material and deliver it in perfect iambic pentameter. Brantley, for his part, says he was “cast because of [his] ability to be a smart ass.”
The propensity to approach children’s programming with intellectual respect also translated into the overall production, as the team treated each episode like a miniature film.
“We tried to make little mini movies, and I think we did,” Buckley says. “We created some magic for children.”
There were battles over loyalty to the source material — Brantley still tells the story of the “Frankenbone” rewrite, when he and Simpson locked eyes and overhauled scenes to stay true to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” That stubborn respect for the material is precisely why the show endured.
The magic that never faded
The show only ran for 50 episodes across two seasons, and was made three decades ago. Yet the fanmail letters keep coming.
At fan conventions, Brantley says people still line up to tell him about the show’s influence on them personally and, in some cases, on the careers they chose.
Some of those stories cut deep. A woman from an abusive household once whispered to him that the show was her only escape. Parents of kids with ADHD told him “Wishbone” was the only thing their hyperactive children could sit still for, even if it was just 30 minutes of their day. Buckley puts it plainly: the show “opened up the world of literature [becoming] a pal when they got home from school.”
It’s hard to think of a higher honor for a children’s program.
An overdue look behind the curtain
Capturing all of the show’s legacy was, fittingly, its own ambitious mess.
“We thought it was going to be a 10-part miniseries,” Stewart admits. “Getting this thing down to an hour and a half was a bear.”
When filming the doc’s interviews wrapped, nobody wanted to leave — the conversations just migrated over to crew member Dean Weaver’s brewpub and kept going.
That reluctance to say goodbye is the documentary’s truest spirit. For Buckley, the choice to make it was obvious.
“It’s the reason that we did the documentary,” she says. “That’s really the only thing anybody ever wanted to talk to me about.”
Brantley, who has spent his life chasing the feeling of those early years, lands somewhere honest and earned.
“My entire career has been spent trying to recapture the magic that we had in those times,” he says. “Mostly what I am is just grateful.”
In the end, “Wishbone” always understood something the rest of us spend a lifetime relearning.
“We can all be the heroes in our story,” Brantley says. “And we’re all going through the same things. At the end of the day, we’re all human.”
The little dog with the big imagination knew it first. And North Texas, it turns out, gave him the stage to say so.
“What’s the Story, Wishbone?” is available now to rent or buy on Apple, Amazon and YouTube Movies.
Preston Barta
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