I'm receiving a lot of questions and comments about those CBS Anniversary clips I featured yesterday morning. Obviously, we don't know why certain people weren't there but I suspect most of the obvious absences were just because someone was not in or around L.A. at the time it was done. In some cases, they may have decided not to bring in everyone from a show with a large cast like M*A*S*H. They also, understandably, favored folks who were on the shows the network was then promoting heavily.
I assume you're all seeing how many in the first clip you can name. If you want to play a game with the second one, try to figure out which stars were shot separately and edited in. I'm pretty sure Bill Cosby's walk-in was an insert. And no, I don't understand why certain people were designated as Wednesday people and others were Thursday and so on. Some of those folks scored their greatest success on a series that was always (or almost always) on one day but the newsmen could have been on any day and so could some of the others.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this but do you get the feeling that most of these performers were really, really proud to be a part of this? Almost all of them have that "I just won an Oscar" look, like this was an important moment of personal validation. The Red Skeltons and the James Arnesses were happy that their place in history was remembered while the Sandy Duncans and the Jamie Farrs were thrilled that they were included in a group with the Red Skeltons and the James Arnesses.
As others have noted, of course, it's also a sad reminder of how many of these people are no longer with us…and how many are but don't work much. There's also a sense of "era" passing. You could do a special like this today and gather an equal number of performers who'd been on a CBS series…but I don't think it would have a smidgen of the impact of seeing Danny Kaye and Phil Silvers and Art Carney and Lucille Ball and so many others.