TV review -- 'Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America'
Image from the documentary "Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America" airing on VH-1 on Feb. 6.
“I was one of the guys who could throw down,” Don Cornelius says in a new documentary about his era-defining run as host of the nation’s funkiest televised dance party, “Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America” (8:30 p.m. CST Saturday on VH1).
He’s not boasting. As they say on the streetcorner, show and prove, and one of many smile-inducing moments in the documentary is rare footage of Cornelius strutting his fine stuff on his own show with the Supremes’ Mary Wilson. Cornelius learned how to glide on the dancefloor while growing up on Chicago’s South Side during the ‘40s and ‘50s, then seguing into a career as a radio and TV newsman and DJ. While employed at WCIU-TV in the ‘60s, he started hosting soul dance parties around the city and eventually approached station management about a show based on the same idea.“Soul Train” debuted in 1970 with a budget so tight it couldn’t afford color cameras or a dancefloor bigger than a typical living room. But the show was an instant hit in Chicago, and started consuming the after-school viewing time of a young, African-American audience that other teen-oriented shows, including Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” largely ignored. Cornelius called in a host of favors, getting artists he had met over the years such as Curtis Mayfield, the O’Jays, B.B. King and Jerry Butler to perform.
But his smartest move was bringing in young dancers he met at parties or on the street to shake, shimmy and strut on the show while the music played. These loose-limbed teens and young adults were the show’s real stars (though they were unpaid), and their plethora of moves – from the “robot” to the “pop and lock” – are still in vogue today. Michael Jackson copped his moonwalk from one of the show’s dancers, who debuted it in the ‘70s. Among the dance troupe’s alumni are actress Rosie Perez, singer Jody Watley and rapper MC Hammer.
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