The Groove Tube

This movie predates SNL by a year. Does being first make you the best? No, obviously not. However, give credit where credit is due. Groove Tube was radical, obnoxious, annoying and hilarious in the 70s. If you're under 30, don't waste your time with this one. ***

You know what they say about the 70's..if you can remember them you weren't there. One of the few things I do remember about the 70's was the very first hippie and hip social satire as seen from a totally 'underground'or counter-culture perspective..The Groove Tube. If the humor seems faded or witless now to some viewers it can only be because a lot has happened in the last 30 years and the comedy isn't 'fresh' anymore..but hey! When this movie came out it was a first..and some of these skits were being done for the very first time...at a time when Nixon was in office, the Vietnam war was raging, the sexual revolution was in full swing..and J.Edgar Hoover was still in charge of the FBI. This is a film made before Watergate broke and as such it was one of the first to take a big swipe at the establishment..to make fun of it and the hippies at the same time. And frankly, some skits are still dead funny. If you liked Cheech and Chong's "Up In Smoke"..you will LOVE this film.

If you want to know what the 70's were really like..check out the Groove Tube.. if you liked the Oscar winning "Network" from about the same year and thought it was right on the mark in its savage look at TV, you will dig the Groove Tube..which picks up on the theme but plays from the angle of the viewers...the young viewers who were turning off the TV in favor of other entertainments.... We had been raised on Ozzie & Harriet "Leave It to Beaver", Father Knows Best, My Three Sons..Happy Days...so imagine our glee when those of us who were experimenting with the new life-styles got to see a send up of the box as seen from our perspective! The commercials by the Uranus corporation alone are priceless.."Good things come from Uranus"....and the sudden break from straight film into Fritz the Cat-style animation when the hippies eat the weed is still one of the best segues in and out of sanity i have ever seen on film.

If you liked the Kentucky Fried Movie, you will LOVE this film. And if you ever wondered why your weird uncle Harold still gets a wicked gleam in his eye when thinking back to his college days..this would be the perfect film to watch.

Take it for what it is..a memento of the times...and a sassy little film that will help all of us who did forget the 70's to remember them anew.

An R-rated "Yellow Pages--let your fingers do the walking" ad. A bizarre kitchen cook show. "The Dealers." "Mumble" jazz music over the Watergate hearings. Koko the Clown. Dated stuff, but occasionally funny stuff, and arguably stranger than either Kentucky Fried Movie or Tunnel Vision. I was surprised to hear that this movie was originally rated X, when it contains less nudity and sex than Kentucky Fried Movie. Perhaps the full frontal nudity of both the hitchhiker and the girl nailed the rating.

Of the skits, The Dealers contains some inspired moments and leads up to a great punchline. Koko the Clown is hilarious. However, the 2001 spoof at the beginning drags on too long, and like Kentucky Fried Movie, the movie is a bit too obsessed with the act of sex. Writer/director/star Ken Shapiro pretty much dropped off the face of the Earth after this movie, unless of course if you count Modern Problems, more "family friendly" than Groove Tube but weird in its own right.

Back in college "midnight movies" at the local theater primarily showed "Barbarella," "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," or "The Groove Tube." "The Groove Tube" was the best of that era's skit movies that included "Dynamite Chicken," "The Boob Tube," and even lesser known attempts at showcasing underground comedy troupes like Second City and The Groundlings. The original version was rated X and featured full frontal male and female nudity. I understand that later versions were edited for an R-rating but perhaps with time the film is back together. At the time it seemed raunchy, dirty, gross, underground, and subversive, but with twenty years of Saturday Night Live, Howard Stern, and films ranging from "Porky's" to "Something About Mary," it's more like 'Saturday Night Live, the Movie' (some skits are funny, most are not, nothing we haven't seen elsewhere.) The funniest and most original skit has to do with a children's show that features a man's private parts dressed up to resemble a puppet. I remember real children's show hosts standing on their head and putting a doll's outfit around their upside down mouth. I always thought that was sick. At the time I couldn't believe that "The Groove Tube" got an actor to do a routine with his exposed penis (this was 1975 after all) and it was pretty shocking...and hilarious. It is no longer shocking, but it is still pretty funny. I hope that they didn't edit that out of the recent showings of the movie. I also always wondered who's penis it was. I think it would have been more provocative if they would have had a female host ala Sheri Lewis or Fran of "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" talk to the penis but like I said it was only 1975.

How can a movie that features the singing of Curtis Mayfield be bad? It can't! The Groove Tube is a series of scatological black-out sketches that makes fun of anything from 2001 to the olympics. The highs, (Koko the clown, the easy lube recipe) outnumber the lows (an all too long "The Dealers"), but even the lows are funny. Best of all is Ken Shapiro's manic dance down a busy Manhattan sidewalk.(That is Shapiro, not Nat King Cole singing Just You, Just Me). Definitely dated now, but at the time The Groove Tube was irreverent, bold, shameless and hysterically funny. Ken Shapiro made this minor cult hit, then 7 years later made the Christmas day opening bomb, Modern Problems (though I enjoyed it} and since then, unfortunately, nothing.(He could possibly be playing drums in a jazz group) The Groove Tube remains to me an unending burst of positive energy, a movie that 26 years after my initial viewing, still brings me real joy!