This one runs almost nine minutes and if you start watching, you may have trouble tearing yourself away from it.
Back in 1982, producer Alexander Cohen whipped up a three-hour special for ABC called The Night of 100 Stars. It was quite an event with well more than a hundred stars appearing in songs and production numbers…though as I recall, some of them just walked onto the stage, received a round of applause and left. The bulk of them, in fact, just performed for a few seconds and then split…but there was still something kind of exciting about a three-hour show where every few seconds, a new surprise guest star appears. (This ties in with our discussion the other day of something I miss — genuine surprises on television. The Night of 100 Stars may have been the first show on TV with too many of them.)
It did so well that Cohen produced two more — in 1985 and 1990. Again each time, there were a lot more than 100 stars on the premises though in these two shows, the definition of "star" was lowered a bit. There are even a couple of people I never heard of in the clip below, which is from the '85 outing. Fortunately, almost everyone is identified by a chyron of their name and a number that represents a running count on the number of stars in the special. A couple of people — like Dick Van Dyke — aren't labelled this way because (I'm guessing) they had already appeared and been counted earlier in the show.
So here's a dance number with an incredible cast. Keep your eye out for a very young Christopher Walken and a very old Van Johnson.
