Today is the anniversary of one of the weirdest natural evolutions of a series, where the franchise ended up completely divorced from its source material, I've ever seen. "Ida Makes a Movie" is a Canadian children's book about an anthropomorphic cat child named Ida winning a film award because the judges mistook her movie to be more profound than it was. Today in 1980, an adaptation of Ida Makes a Movie debuted on CBC TV. This adaptation changed all the characters to humans.
This short was well received enough to receive a full series, and that full series featured Toronto kids dealing with problems kids watching at home might have been dealing with. As the series progressed, the problems grew with the kids and more serious topics were addressed, this kept going until the series that started with a cat girl filming garbage turned into a full teen drama with characters dying and teen pregnancy and everything. And today we call this franchise Degrassi.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Tom, that last sentence slapped me in the face like a truck made of wet fish.]
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