Ford Star Jubilee

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Ford Star Jubilee
Genre	anthology
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	12
Production
Running time	90 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	CBS
Original run	September 24, 1955 – November 3, 1956

Ford Star Jubilee was a live, ninety minute, color spectacular that aired once a month on Saturday nights on CBS from September 1955 to November 1956.

Ford Motor Company sponsored this big-budget Comedy / Drama / Music anthology series, which featured big name performers, color broadcast and a longer than normal 90 minute format.

This series routinely featured major stars, such as Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Orson Welles, Julie Andrews (at the time that she was appearing in My Fair Lady on Broadway), Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Lillian Gish, Charles Laughton, Jack Lemmon, Raymond Massey, Lauren Bacall, Claudette Colbert, Noel Coward, Nat 'King' Cole, Mary Martin, Eddie Fisher, Ella Fitzgerald, Debbie Reynolds and Red Skelton.

Instead of the usual live performance, the final episode was a special, two hour presentation of the 1939 MGM film "The Wizard of Oz", hosted by Bert Lahr, 10 year old Liza Minnelli and young Oz expert Justin Schiller. The broadcast was a ratings smash, but the film was not shown on TV again until 1959, when it was shown at an earlier hour (6:00 P.M., E.S.T.) as a Christmas season special in its own right, not as an anthology episode. This broadcast attracted an even wider audience, because children were able to watch, and thus began the tradition of showing the film annually on television.