ACT had vigorously fought to keep on the air. To ACT, this was an abrupt reversal of some 12 years of progress. That era also saw the debut of many toy-inspired programs, which ACT contended were nothing more than program-length commercials: G. I. Joe, My Little Pony, The Transformers, M.A.S.K., He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and the controversial Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Throughout the 1980s, ACT criticized television programs that featured popular toys such as G. I. Joe and He-Man, maintaining that they "blur(red) the distinction between program content and commercial speech," and successfully barred one program, Garbage Pail Kids, from the air. It also opposed the proposed introduction of Channel One News, a television news show designed for children featuring advertiser-based programming, into public schools, an effort which met with only limited success, due to lucrative inducements the company made to financially-strapped school boards of that time. ACT brought many cases before the courts, including Action for Children's Television v. FCC, 821 F.2d 741 (D.C. Cir. 1987) often cited in media law. ACT's efforts culminated in the passage of the Children's Television Act of 1990, establishing formal guidelines for children's programming, including rules governing advertising, content and quantity. This represented a rare instance at the time of the FCC departing from its ideologically driven program of reversing broadcasting regulations imposed in the 1960s and 1970s. Co-founder Peggy Charren commented in 1995, after the organization's dissolution, "Too often, we try to protect children by doing in free speech." See also Regulations on children's television programming in the United States Notes References C. Alperowicz & R. Krock. Rocking the Boat: Celebrating 15 Years of Action for Children's Television. Newtonville, Mass.: Action for Children's Television, 1983. Loree Gerdes Bykerk & Ardith Maney. U.S. Consumer Interest Groups: Institutional Profiles. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995, pp. 2–5. Barry G. Cole & Mal Oettinger. Reluctant Regulators: The FCC and the Broadcast Audience. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978. Roger Dean Duncan. “Rhetoric of the Kidvid Movement: Ideology, Strategies, and Tactics”, Central States Speech Journal 27, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 129–135. Laurie A. Trotta. “Children's Advocacy Groups: A History and Analysis”, ch. 35 of Handbook of Children and the Media, 2nd edn. Eds. Dorothy G. Singer & Jerome L. Singer. LA-NY-London: SAGE, 2012, pp. 697–713. External links ACT article in the Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence ACT at the Museum of Broadcast