Wishbone is an American half-hour live-action children's television show produced from 1995 to 1997. It was originally broadcast on PBS and later rebroadcast on PBS Kids and PBS Kids Go!. The show's title character is a Jack Russell Terrier. Wishbone lives with his owner Joe Talbot in the fictional 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 whichever famous character he is currently portraying and not as a dog. The show won four Daytime Emmys, a Peabody Award, and honors from the Television Critics Association. Wishbone's exterior shots were filmed on the backlot of Lyrick Studios's teen division Big Feats! Entertainment[1] in Allen, Texas, and its interior shots were filmed on a sound stage in a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m2) warehouse in Plano, Texas. Additional scenes were filmed in Grapevine, Texas.[citation needed]
This show garnered particular praise for refusing to bowdlerize many of the sadder or more unpleasant aspects of the source works, which usually enjoyed a fairly faithful retelling in the fantasy sequences.[citation needed]
The show also inspired several book series. Altogether, more than fifty books have featured Wishbone, which continued to be published even after the TV series ended production. In 1998, the TV movie Wishbone's Dog Days of the West was aired. The show continued to air in reruns nationally until August 31, 2001. The show was replaced on the PBS Kids schedule on September 3, 2001, by Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat.[citation needed] In 2006, when a PBS Kids Go! digital channel was announced, PBS planned to air Wishbone on the channel. However, when the digital channel was canceled, Wishbone returned in reruns on the PBS national program service through PBS Kids Go! on June 2, 2007. Wishbone clips came to the PBS Kids Go! website. The return to PBS lasted a short time, although some PBS stations continued to air Wishbone until the discontinuation of PBS Kids Go! in 2013.[2]
The series aired on PBS Kids Sprout as part of its "Let's Go Show" block from 2007 to 2009. However, Sprout pulled it from the schedule before it rebranded the channel.
A film adaptation of the series from Universal Pictures and Mattel Films is in the works with Peter Farrelly serving as producer.[3]
