THE GROOVE TUBE: you had to be there

With the benefit of hindsight it's tempting to see THE GROOVE TUBE as an inspiration for 'Saturday Night Live.' Released just a year before the now legendary tv show made its debut, this film is also a collection of unrelated sketches and spoofs most of which aren't funny and several of which feature a young Chevy Chase.
Writer-director-star Ken Shapiro is a forgotten name today but judging by his ubiquity here he must have been enough of a rising talent in the mid 70s for someone to consider it worth their while to bankroll this personal vanity project.
A ramshackle attempt to send up 1970s American tv, this assemblage of skits targets everything from crime dramas to cookery shows to the evening news, with a smattering of nudity thrown in, but mostly misses. The most labored sequence - featuring Shapiro and a young Richard Belzer as a couple of hopeless drug dealers - is also the longest, outstaying its welcome by several painful minutes.

But just like SNL there are a few laughs to be had too. My favorites are a demonstration on how to bake a 'July 4th Heritage Cake' and the final musical number featuring Shapiro as 'Dancing Man' and proving that whatever his comedic shortcomings he certainly understood how to move his slightly podgy body to maximum comic effect.
The aforementioned Chevy Chase gives no indication of the comedy powerhouse he was to become just a few short years later, and on the basis of this film alone it would be difficult to guess that he would become a star and Shapiro would be the one to sink into obscurity.
Time has not been kind to THE GROOVE TUBE. What was anarchic, edgy comedy in 1974 now appears dated and tame, but the film has value as a history lesson. It reveals at least one of the influences on 'Saturday Night Live' which was in turn to prove so influential on the direction of  development of American comedy over the following 10 - 15 years. Just don't expect to laugh too much.