- The Groove Tube
Infobox Film
name = The Groove Tube
caption =
director =Ken Shapiro
producer = Ken Shapiro
writer = Ken ShapiroLane Sarasohn Rich Allen
starring = Ken ShapiroRichard Belzer Chevy Chase
music =
cinematography =Bob Bailin
editing =
distributor =Levitt-Pickman
released =
runtime = 75 min.
country = US
awards =
language = English
budget =
preceded_by =
followed_by =
amg_id = 1:20968
imdb_id = 0071583"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 featuredR-rated video recordings shown on three television sets, which was a novelty to the audiences of the mid 1970s. The film starredRichard Belzer andChevy Chase , and featured "Move On Up" byCurtis 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 Chevy Chase for his signatureWeekend 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 forvenereal disease that covertly used a real penis, and a television cooking show featuring incompetent recipes.Several spoof TV commercials are featured, including a few for the mythical industrial conglomerate Uranus Corporation (pronounced "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.ee also
* "
The Kentucky Fried Movie "
* "Amazon Women on the Moon "
* "Tunnel Vision"
* "American Raspberry"Trivia
* The opening scene begins with an almost spot-on recreation of the "Dawn of Man" sequence from the 1968 film "".
External links
*imdb title|id=0071583|title=The Groove Tube
*amg movie|id=1:20968|title=The Groove Tube
*rotten-tomatoes|id=groove_tube|title=The Groove Tube
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