The Lookback : Kids of Degrassi Street: Ida Makes a Movie

The Flashback  Joshuaonline Canada 

     "Degrassi" is an interesting show, depending on who you are, invoking this name might mean different things.  Degrassi is a franchise from Canada that being 1979 with a four short films akin to the after school special.  These films became part of the series   "Kids of Degrassi Street". The basic premise of is really just kids being kids and it focuses on kids who live on Degrassi Street. The show was mostly realistic and dealt things like honesty, death, divorce, and other issues kids could face in their lives.  It got popular and spawned a spin off series "Degrassi Junior High" and later "Degrassi High"   All these series ran in Canada on the CBC and PBS had in a America.

     It came back in a new form with "Degrassi:The Next Generation" which ran on CTV in Canada and The N in the US. It began in 2001 and ran long enough that the next generation were gone and they dropped that name and called it just Degrassi. Then as of this writing, there was Degrassi: The Next Class, which is apparently the shortest lived Degrassi series. 

    It was created by Linda Schuyler, who was school teacher and worked on short films that insipired the idea of Degrassi.

    Anyway, this blog post is going to be talking about the very very very first piece of Degrassi media that ever existed, this is "Ida Makes a Movie" that first aired September 12th 1979.


            The movie starts with Ida and her friend Cookie at the park and there's a sign for a movie competition. Ida decides she wants to make a film but finds that the camera needs a little work, but her mother encourages her to at least check to see how much it would cost to fix and to get some film for it. 

   
         The quality of the short does have this style of someone making like a low cost movie, it kind of just feels like we're watching a film of Ida trying to make a film, it's kind of a nice presentation really.  Ida doesn't have enough money to fix her camera. She tries asking her brother,Fred, for the money ,but he is of no help.  So, Ida decides to sell some of her old junk.

this must have been a good garage sale, they sold the garage! 

          This works and she figures out how to make record things.  She wants to make a movie about garbage and Fred helps her and Cookie.  I will point out that Fred is wearing a helmet that he purchased from Ida and uh this will play into this film soon.  Poor Cookie's doll got lost up in the action into a garbage truck.

       Two weeks later, Ida found out her film has selected as a finalist in the film festival. Oh, the film people think that the movie is about war and its effect on children. ( Yep, that's what I got from the movie too) Cookie says they might get made when they find out the movie is about garbage and not war.  Ida's not going to let this get out. (scandal)

           Finally, it's the awards night and she did let the guilt eat at her.  After a roundabout way of asking her mother, she decides to go to the awards show.  Ida wins the thing and they show the film, first before anything else. Yep, and I can see how the movie can be seen as like war.   Ida Lucas gets called up to the stage.  Ida explains that the movie wasn't about war, it was about garbage and she hands back the award.   The man explains that there was more to the movie than just the idea of it being about war and still felt it had merit so, Ida gets the award anyway.

   

Better than the Oscars

          You can the tell the moral is about honesty. It does have that feel like they would play this in a class then ask the students questions. (who would do that?) I do like depicts a childhood situation naturally, even the lines feel natural, and the film style does feel like someone was recording Ida's moments and just following her, that's kind of great style.  Maybe it's because were so used to polished stuff it feels like this might been an intended style and it might have been but, I'm not going to let that stop my sentence.

       It is based off a book of the same name.  But from the cover, Ida wasn't a cat in this film. (Hollywood, uhhh Toronto always trying to make things more flash)

     It's kind of an interesting way to see how Degrassi got its start with focus on normal kids doing normal things and presenting  a moral for it's audience to think about without forcing it.   It was a nice bit of slice of life. 

    That's our lookback, and we've now go to tell someone that this blog isn't about the dowers of war, I'm still confused on how they got that confused. 

    If you are interested in this series and are in the United States, PBS has it for sale on their site. https://shop.pbs.org/the-kids-of-degrassi-street-complete-collection-dvd-3pk/product/WG31169  They didn't pay us to say that, we just wanted to pass it along.  I've also seen it on Amazon in the US and Canada, I wish I could say where else in Canada it's sold.