The Kids of Degrassi Street is a Canadian children's television series created by Kit Hood and Linda Schuyler. The first entry in the Degrassi franchise and the only one to focus on children instead of teenagers, it follows the lives of a group of children living on De Grassi Street in Toronto. It was produced by Hood and Schuyler's independent company Playing With Time. The series originated as a collection of annual standalone short films that started with Ida Makes a Movie, a live-action adaptation of the Kay Chorao book which premiered on the CBC on December 8, 1979. It became a full series in 1982 when the CBC ordered five more episodes. It is notable for featuring several actors who would later star in Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High playing different characters. Development Linda Schuyler, a seventh and eighth grade teacher at Earl Grey Senior Public School in Toronto, formed the company Playing With Time with Kit Hood in 1976. At the time, Schuyler had been teaching her students an early version of media studies, which included filmmaking with Super-8 film. Discovering that there was a lack of resources on the subject, Earl Grey librarian Bruce Mackey ordered several books about filmmaking, one of which was the picture book Ida Makes a Movie, which was written by Kay Chorao. Neither were aware that Ida Makes A Movie was a preschool book, in which the titular character was a cat. Nonetheless, Schuyler felt the story was powerful, and became interested in making a live-action adaptation, featuring children instead of cats. She sought the advice of then-lawyer and future Epitome Pictures co-founder Stephen Stohn, who advised her to forego a lawyer, and instead propose the deal herself. Schuyler flew to New York, where she met with Chorao and secured a $200 deal to adapt the book into a movie. Yan Moore, who would eventually become Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High's head writer, became a writer for the series after he rectified problems with the story of the episode Casey Draws The Line. Opening sequence and music The opening sequence consists of a short piano piece, set to black and white stills of the Leslieville neighbourhood. Wendy Watson and Lewis Manne, who later composed the music for Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, composed the music for The Kids Of Degrassi Street, with John Forbes initially performing the music on