The Complicated Legacy of Peggy Charren

Spend enough time in r/cartoons, and you'll see that people there tend to be obsessed with categorizing stuff. They'll often argue over, for example, what the "best" and "worst" decade for TV animation was, as if there's even such a thing. And one of the most common choices for the worst decade for cartoons is the 1970s. To hear people on the main cartoon sub talk about it, the 1970s were an endless sea of Scooby-Doo ripoffs and de-fanged comedies-- there's no mention of, for example, the works of Ralph Bakshi or the rise of modern anime. But how did this idea come to exist?

Enter Peggy Charren. She was a social-justice advocate in the late 1960s who campaigned against the excessive commercialization of children's TV. At the time, there was no real limit to how much TV networks could market to kids, and many shows were essentially advertisements for toys and comic books. She wanted to create a more welcoming TV environment for kids. If that sounds at all familiar, it's the same line of reasoning Fred Rogers used when he came up with Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood around the same time.

Charren's group, Action for Children's Television (ACT), complained to the FCC about many cartoons, especially those in the adventure and superhero genres, and lobbied to have them cancelled. While ACT was not wholly responsible for these shows being cancelled-- America was going through a general decline in interest in all things sci-fi and futuristic in the late 1960s-- they definitely played a role in getting shows such as Space Ghost, Jonny Quest, SeaLab 2020, and the original Spider-Man cartoon pulled from reruns.

The cartoon fandom has taken to seeing Peggy Charren as something of a fun-hating villain who ushered in a "dark age" of animation. And that's not the real story. Or at least, it's not the whole story. While ACT certainly disliked the low-budget cartoons being aimed at kids by Hanna-Barbera and other studios in the 1960s, in other ways they actually pushed the boundaries of animation. The ABC network launched its After-School Special line of TV movies, the first of which, "Last of the Curlews", was one of the most poignant and emotional stories told in American animation up to that time.

It doesn't help that the loosening of restrictions on advertising in kids' shows in the early 1980s was what allowed a number of now-beloved franchises, such as Transformers, My Little Pony, He-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to thrive, further giving the impression that ACT's regulations were ultimately a negative for the cartoon industry. Fans of these "thirty-minute toy commercial" shows often treat ACT and groups like them as pesky obstacles that had to be overcome in order for their favorite franchises to exist.

In a sense, that's true; it's hard to imagine those shows existing if the ACT regulations still applied. However, ACT is often compared to the Comics Code, a censorship bureau set up in 1954 to regulate what comic books were allowed to publish, which ended up crippling the American comic industry. There's a big difference, though. Unlike the Comics Code, which was based on a completely unfounded moral panic that comics would corrupt children, ACT was born out of a legitimate desire to protect children from the dangers of excess advertising, something that is even more worrisome today in the social media age.

So was Peggy Charren a hero or a villain? Does it matter? She contributed to the history of American animation in both good and bad ways, and we need to accept that.