The Groove Tube  

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The Groove Tube is a 1974 American Independent comedy film written and produced by Ken Shapiro and starring Shapiro, Richard Belzer and Chevy Chase. It features the song Move On Up by Curtis Mayfield in its opening scene.

The low-budget movie satirizes 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 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 that segment.

Randa Haines, who later directed Children of a Lesser God, was script supervisor.

Plot

Among the skits are:

• "The Dealers," a lengthy feature about a pair of urban drug dealers (Shapiro and Belzer) introduced by a wildly overdone, hip title segment
• "Koko the Clown," a mock children's television show in which Shapiro, as the show's Bozo-esque host, reads erotica (specifically a page from Fanny Hill, with promises of Marquis de Sade the next day) on air during "Make Believe Time"
• a public service announcement for venereal disease that covertly (though more and more obviously as the camera zooms in, to humorous and/or shocking effect) used a real penis
• a parody of sponsored television cooking shows in which Shapiro, as a female baker seen from the shoulders down, mixes and bakes a special 4 of July "Heritage Loaf" while repeatedly using handfuls of the fictitious "Kramp Easy Lube" brand of shortening, a spoof of the "Kraft" name
• Buzzy Linhart appears in the film as an (eventually) naked hitchhiker. He also supervised the film's soundtrack.
• Sex olympics, starring Mary Mendum as Mary Mendham

Several spoof TV commercials are featured, including a few for the fictional Uranus Corporation (pronounced with the stress on the second and third syllables). 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."

Release

The Groove Tube was originally released with an X rating.

See also

• List of American films of 1974
• Sketch comedy
• Chevy Chase
• Fanny Hill
• Parody film
• List of pornographic actors who appeared in mainstream films
• Boob tube
• Forrest Tucker
• List of drug films
• List of American comedy films
• Evil Dead
• Richard Belzer
• Gross out
• Groovy
• Jennifer Welles
• The Great American Dream Machine
• American Raspberry (film)
• Bill Bailey (American actor)
• Movie 43
• Muffie Meyer
• Alex Stevens