I've decided that for a while here, our video links will binge on moments from those self-congratulatory specials that the three major networks did any time they had anything they could claim as an anniversary. There were quite a few of them and they all seemed to be built on the goal of getting as many familiar faces on screen as possible. In some, you could sense the conflict between celebrating the network's long history and plugging their current offerings.
They don't do these anymore and I suspect a lot of that is because they don't have too many people now they can trot out with any sense of history. In the seventies and eighties, there will still plenty of stars from the forties and fifties who were alive and ambulatory. Today, I don't think a gathering of stars from forty years back would be all that impressive.
This clip is from an ABC special that aired February 5, 1978. It's a song led by Toni Tennille…and I'm puzzled as to why since her ABC series had been canceled a year earlier and the network had current stars to promote. Needless to say, though her microphone was live, it was probably the only one on stage after the first half-dozen stars joined in the song. Most of the group singing is a pre-recorded (or possibly live offstage) chorus of professional vocalists, not the stars gamely mouthing the words to the song which were probably on some very large TelePrompters scattered about.
It's really a great "Where's Waldo?" video and I wish the director had panned the crowd more as I'm sure a lot of folks never got on-camera. I don't quite get the presence of some people in there like John Wayne and Ed McMahon, and it looks like some of the biggest ABC stars fled for the outside fringes of the crowd and some of the lesser-known crowded to center…and could Paul Lynde have looked less like he wanted to be there? If you were ever on ABC — or if you even just watched it more than once — you're probably in there somewhere…