[The Celluloid Pantry will go on a short hiatus while Nora takes a writer’s residency at the Blue Mountain Center. We’ll return July 25th.]
Sandra Lee, take note. Back in the era of condensed soup recipes, uber-processed “space-age” ingredients, and no-mixing required “dump cakes,” a troupe of young comedians was thinking outside the can.
A loopy, counterculture-fueled satire of broadcast television, featuring an astoundingly young Richard Belzer and Chevy Chase, The Groove Tube (1974) is a heady cocktail of Watergate-era sketch comedy, ranging from the mildly off-color to the all-out raunchy. Among its most memorable segments is “Kramp TV Kitchen,” a send-up of the old product-flogging Kraft “hands” commercials (Canadian readers especially may remember these spots from “The Carol Burnett Show”). The soothing voiceover makes it all sound so easy:
