Just finished watching The Groove Tube which I first saw about 23 years ago when I was a teenager staying up way past my bedtime watching HBO with my brother and his best friend. We had also watched Animal House just before that so we saw two movies that starred an SNL alumna and had some naked breasts. Good thing our parents were asleep the whole time! Anyway, there were lots of weird and funny things in this movie that were eye-openers like the Brown 25 sequence of the Uranus Industries commercial ("with the taste of beef stew" says the announcer as what is apparently human excrement comes out of a white tube. Ewww!) or the face of the puppet talking about VD (a scrotum with a small penis with eyes glued on). Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer made their feature film debuts here. Chase is hilarious whether doing a Geritan spot with a woman stripping, having his hands have sex in a "Let Fingers Do It" commercial, or singing "Four Leaf Clover" with co-writer/director Ken Shapiro drumming his hands on his head. Belzer teams with Shapiro in "The Dealers" movie, and on "Channel One Evening News" with one wild bit having Belzer as a black prostitute trying tricks on reporter Ken who plays Lionel here. "Lionel, that sounds like a train that I'm going to ride like a Choo-Choo!" Other outrageous bits include "The Koko Show" with Shipiro as a kid clown show host who, after ordering the "people over ten" to leave the room, reads requests of his viewers like passages of "Fanny Hill"! Or how about the Olympics segment with a German couple making love being announced by two men (one of them Spanish) as they get explicit while "Please Stand By" keeps interrupting on the screen! Or the animated segment on "The Dealers" which depicts dancing toilets after Shapiro ingested some marijuana! Not everything's so dirty. Besides the "Four Leaf Clover" skit, at the end there's a highly amusing music segment with Ken lip-syncing his own recording of "Just You, Just Me" while dancing with suit and briefcase around the city with occasionally a cop (co-writer Lane Sarasohn) joining in. So, in summation this is one weirdly, funny movie that seemed to influence other like films (Tunnelvision, Kentucky Fried Movie) and possibly Saturday Night Live (which made Chevy that show's first star) and, despite some dated elements, can still amuse today. P.S. While I liked hearing Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" during the gorillas dancing/hitchhiking beginning sequence, I did wonder what the point was with the sequence of the hitchhiker and the woman who picked him up, having them running from the car, stripping on the run, and then having the naked man get caught by the cop who stopped on the road. Guess it's one of those '70s streaking things...

This is the type of film that in 1974 an 11 year old like me would have spent the whole time "tee hee'ing" at, a naughty, sexual view of some of the TV tropes of the mid 1970's. You know what is going to happen when a clown kiddie show sends the adults out of the room, and a series of commercials for the "Uranus Corporation" just get increasingly perverted. There's a spoof of the phone company and their "Let Your Fingers do the Walking" advertising, a gay themed version of a Catholic anti-drug short film, and a Wild World of Sports spoof that is basically a round the world sex competition. A commercial that turns human waste into an edible product. Chevy Chase appears in a musical commercial spoof that is perhaps the only tactful moment of the film. In the film's favor, there are some nice vintage shots of 70's New York City where a dancer prances through some highly recognizable midtown business districts.

I have no objection to a little bit of blue humor, and I can understand from the mentality I would have had when this came out how ripe American television was for spoofing. But 75 minutes of it non-stop does get a little tiresome after a while, and the dated elements of it outweigh what stands the test of time. There are funnier scenes in "Kentucky Fried Movie" which at least had the team of Zucker and Abrams writing the sketches. This does have its share of nudity (male and female),and the gay context is not in the least meant to be offensive. You can't expect art in a film like this, but you should get at least some humor which this only has in dribs and drabs.

I saw this in Detroit in what must have been its original run. I literally rolled into the aisle of the theater. It was that funny. I haven't seen it since, but would love to. Where do you get a copy? Anybody saying anything about it being dated or overdone are, for my money, just a bunch of poseurs. Each skit is either wickedly, erotically or perversely hilarious. Each one! There is not a weak one included. The opening sequence, for instance, which parodies 2001, features gorilla go-go-dancers with pendulous breasts. Felinni would have filmed it had he the wicked wit... If you come to this film with an open mind and a blithely sneering heart, you'll pencil it right into your very best list.