The Groove Tube

The Groove Tube (1974), written and produced by Ken Shapiro, was a low-budget comedy film. It satirized television and the counterculture of the early 1970s. The film was originally produced to be shown at the Channel One Theater on East 60th St. in New York, a venue that featured R-rated video recordings shown on three television sets, which was a novelty to the audiences of the time. The film starred Richard Belzer and Chevy Chase, and featured "Move On Up" by Curtis Mayfield in the film's opening scene. The news desk satire, including the signature line "Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow" was later used by Chase for his signature Weekend Update piece on Saturday Night Live, although in the film he does not appear in this segment.

Among the skits were "The Dealers", a feature about a pair of urban drug dealers introduced by a wildly overdone, hip title segment, "Koko the Clown" featuring a jaded clown reading erotica to the kids, a public service announcement for venereal disease that covertly used a real penis, and a parody of sponsored television cooking shows (it bakes up an inedible "brick" while repeatedly using the fictitious "Kramp Easy Lube" shortening, a spoof of the "Kraft" name).

Several spoof TV commercials are featured, including a few for the mythical industrial conglomerate Uranus Corporation (pronounced with the typical "ur-AY-nuss" in the film). One Uranus commercial touts the amazing properties of its space-age polymer product "Brown 25" (which looks suspiciously like human feces): "It has the strength of steel, the flexibility of rubber, and the nutritional value of beef stew."

Buzzy Linhart appears in the film as an (eventually) naked hitchhiker. He also supervised the film's soundtrack.

External links

• The Groove Tube at the Internet Movie Database
• The Groove Tube at AllRovi
• The Groove Tube at Rotten Tomatoes