“Wunda Wunda is my name. Oh boys and girls, I’m glad you came. We’ll have fun as I explain, how we play our Wunda games.
Let me take you by the hand and we’ll go to Wonderland. There we’ll play with every friend The Wunda games of let’s pretend.”
Ruth Prins was an actor and drama teacher at the University of Washington in 1949 when KING 5 recruited her to help them develop quality children’s programming.
Today, Ruth Prins, who played Wunda Wunda and many other characters, is still living in Seattle with a passionate fanbase that still shares memories on Facebook. She recently celebrated her 100th birthday. (KING 5)
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I always felt conflicted about WW. On the one hand, she was a treat; but on the other, I had to take a nap when her show was over.
Still haven’t worked it out.
A lion, eh? Well. I knew it was a giant pussycat of some kind! And I know what I had for dinner tonight too!
From HistoryLink.com: Ruth Prins was first the Story Lady for the award-winning Televenture Tales, reading books to a camera and a clutch of lucky Seattle grade schoolers.
What a fine lady. I had no idea she was still alive. I’ll never forget how she kept her composure with her arm in that tiger’s mouth.
Prins tells of a Wunda director bringing in a young, allegedly tame lion to sit beside her as a prop as she told Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child.” He clamped on her arm with his jaws and as she intrepidly read on with cameras rolling, he tightened his grip. “I was not harmed,” she said, “though my sleeve was gummed off, and my husband didn’t kill the director, so [it] all worked out”. (Michael Hood)
Happy 100th Ruth ( a memorable and happy part of my childhood)
Ruth Prins is a great example of a woman being a strong example of someone forging her own, indelible career in a time when men called most of the shots…I was a little too old, to appreciate her ability to connect with very young children…In a way, she was like a female Mr. Rogers!…I do remember, that. prior to her transforming into Wunda Wunda, she had hosted another form of children’s show, where very young kids-recruited from volunteers from the Seattle School District, would sit in a circle, around Ruth, who was dressed sort of like a princess…she would simply read children’s stories to those kids…that show was the very first show of its type on the West Coast…she won awards for it…after that, she morphed into Wunda Wunda…she was well into her 30s when all this was happening…She lives with a daughter, in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood…BTW, under all of her outfits and makup, was a very beautiful woman, who probably could have turned towards Hollywood if she had wanted to, given her studies and teachings about stage acting…a remarkable woman for sure.