Feel-Good Friday: What's the Story Wishbone?

We couldn't wrap up a week of Literary Characters on the Rescue Dog Blog without talking about Wishbone.  It's a little different than our other Feel-Good Friday posts, but I feel the need to share everything that's right about television when television is done right.

Wishbone was a series from the 1990s that aired on PBS. For those of you who don't know, each episode featured a daydream of Wishbone, a Jack Russell Terrier, as a character in a famous work of literature.  

I guess Wishbone had a bigger costume budget than Wiley has.

 I had to look up the exact years (1995-1998) but I had a pretty good guess that it was the mid-90s, because I was in college at the time studying to be an English teacher.  My mother ran a small daycare out of our house, and that's how I learned about Wishbone.

I watched it every day, and found myself shushing the kids if they got too loud. I imagined how much I would have loved something like that when I was a child, and pictured future English classes in which I could show little clips of Wishbone just for fun.

Wishbone tackled intense roles, from Romeo to Silas Marner, and didn't only portray the fun and fluff.  Alas, Wishbone has given way for a talking sponge and crime fighting turtles and other less literary entertainment.  Fortunately, YouTube has a plethora of Wishbone videos, and I'm linking to the Romeo and Juliet one right here.  I'm currently studying this play with my students, but I also picked this one because it involves Wishbone falling for a shelter dog, which of course turns out to be a star-crossed love affair.

I have never shown an episode of Wishbone to my students, because the episodes really haven't been available. Thank you World Wide Web, and my students will thank you too. Now I know exactly what to do with them on those noon dismissal days when the class periods are only 20 minutes long.

I hope you're inspired to do a little reading this weekend. Make sure you put the book down just long enough to share pictures of your sleeping pets and your rescue stories!