HOW TORONTO BECAME A HUB FOR KIDS’ TV

Before Drake was Drake, he was Jimmy on Degrassi. The long-running franchise was one of the first to put Toronto on the global map as a hub of youth-aimed entertainment.

Home to big players such as CBC Kids, TVO, YTV and Nelvana (both part of Corus), as well as independent production companies such as Sinking Ship and Radical Sheep, Toronto produces a ton of children’s TV that is watched around the world.

You might remember shows such as Goosebumps, The Big Comfy Couch and Fraggle Rock, which were all made at least partially here, and so are newer ones like Annedroids, Paw

Patrol and Super Why. CBC recently launched its kid-geared Studio K at its local headquarters, as the hub for all its children’s programming.

The city is home to Centennial College’s children’s media program, which claims to be the only offering of its kind in Canada. Along with the yearlong certificate course that produces between 12 and 20 graduates per year, the college also hosts the Children’s Entertainment and Media Centre for research focused on children’s content creation.

Recognizing that Toronto was already a production hub, Centennial’s Nate Horowitz had the idea of starting both the program and the institute at the college.

He felt there were gaps in teaching and research in the area of kids’ media in Canada.

In establishing the research institute seven years ago, Horowitz said he wanted to create a place where academics and industry experts could look into what children need, how they learn and explore the impact of society’s changing values and technology on young people.

“They might understand children, but they perhaps needed more help understanding childhood development and some of the latest trends, digital particulars that are impacting children’s sense of self,” he said.

Horowitz said that kids’ content that’s produced in Canada has a good reputation abroad.

“We treat children as learners and not as consumers,” Horowitz said of the Canadian approach to content creation. “So our products tend to be not so much sweet cereal-driven or consumer-driven . . . and I think that’s what Canadian industry is about.”

When it comes to kids’ programming within the country, Centennial’s Helen Sianos pegs Vancouver as Toronto’s closest rival, pointing to the city’s specialty in animation.

“But right now we’re kind of standing at the top, I would say,” she said. Sianos thinks the city has long been a centre for children’s programming — going back to the era of Mr. Dressup, which ran on the CBC from the late 1960s until the early ’90s.