In the middle of a history class, Joe makes a crossword out of the name of the teacher, Miss Gretchen Malloy, revealing his schoolboy crush on her. She confiscates the embarrassing paper, and now Joe has to get it back from her before a bully named Curtis can manage to steal it. Wishbone imagines himself as C. Auguste Dupin in "The Purloined Letter" by Edgar Allan Poe.
One tie-in book was released — The Adventures of Wishbone #11: The Pawloined Paper, a straight adaptation of the episode.
Tropes
- Actually Pretty Funny: Miss Malloy can't help but smirk when she sees the whole school chasing after Wishbone, due to how fast he is. She tells Joe jokingly that he should be attending class.
- Adaptation Name Change: In the story adaptation, the villain is called "the chancellor" instead of "the minister," possibly because American kids would be likely to interpret "minister" as a religious title.
- Bowdlerize: In the original story, the object that Dupin deliberately forgot was a snuff-box. The creators evidently didn't want to mention drug paraphernalia on their PBS kids' show, so it's just referred to as "some personal item" without being shown.
- Chekhov's Gun: Miss Malloy always uses both sides of a piece of paper.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: Within the adaptation segments, the namesake letter is hidden in a stack of mail on the suspect's desk. This is paralleled in the real-world story, first by Wishbone trying to find a toy and then by Joe trying to find the paper that Miss Malloy confiscated.
- Named by the Adaptation: In the original stories, Dupin's sidekick was unnamed. Here, he's given the name Claude.
- Precocious Crush: Joe develops a crush on his young female history teacher. She finds out, but merely corrects his spelling on a crossword he made of her name.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: After Miss Malloy confiscates a paper that Joe and Curtis are fighting over in class, she finds it was a crossword that Joe made of her name, and then uses the other side to write some assignments. Later, when she sees Joe at school after hours, having recognized Wishbone running through the school, she tells him he misspelled "excellent" but is flattered that he finds her "cool." All in all, a pretty reasonable response to a student's crush.
- Replaced with Replica: Of course, Dupin does this in "The Purloined Letter." It's mirrored in the real world by Joe tracing another assignment list to replace the one that was made out of his paper.
- Shout-Out: To Star Trek: The Original Series:Wishbone: [doing his best William Shatner impression] We've come to seek out new classrooms, to boldly go where no dog has gone before.
- We Need a Distraction: As Dupin pays a man to cause a disturbance in the streets, Joe gets Wishbone to run amok in the school.
