The Tube Bar prank calls are a series of prank calls made in the mid-1970s to the Tube Bar in
Jersey City
Jersey City is the second-most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey, after Newark.bar
Bar or BAR may refer to:
Food and drink
* Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages
* Candy bar
* Chocolate bar
Science and technology
* Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment
* Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud
* Bar (u ...
, if they could speak to various non-existent customers. The gag names given by the pranksters were puns and homophones for often offensive phrases. Recordings of the calls were circulated widely on duplicated cassette tapes and may have been the inspiration for a long running gag in '' The Simpsons''.
History
In the mid-1970s, two young men—John Elmo and Jim Davidson; later known collectively as ''Bum Bar Bastards'', or ''The BBB''—began calling the Tube Bar located at Journal Square in
Jersey City, New Jersey
Jersey City is the second-most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey, after Newark. "Al Coholic" (''alcoholic'') or "Mike Hunt" (''my cunt''). Most of the time, Deutsch would call out the names, unaware that he was being subjected to a prank.
At times, Deutsch would catch on, and when he did, he would respond with extreme hostility, shouting profanity, obscene sexual references (usually involving the caller's mother), and threats of physical harm at the caller. He would utter threats such as, "I'll break dem bones on you, on your feet, you'll never be able to walk for the rest of your life!" as well as "I'll cut your belly open and show you all the black stuff you got in there!" Sometimes Red would offer the two pranksters a reward of $100 or $500 if they would show up at his bar in person, but they never took him up on the offer.
By the 1980s, dubbed cassette tapes of the calls were shared between staff of several major league sports teams such as the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers and Miami Dolphins. These dubbed copies of the calls were unofficially referred to as the ''Red Tapes'' or ''Tube Bar Tapes''. The popularity of these prank calls spread throughout respective sports leagues, branching out to sports reporters and then into the larger media world.
Bar location and details
The Tube Bar itself was located at 12 Tube Concourse, Jersey City, adjacent to the entrance of the Journal SquarePATH station and across the way from the Landmark
Loew's Jersey Theatre
The Loew's Jersey Theatre is a theater in Jersey City, New Jersey. Opened in 1929, it was one of the five Loew's Wonder Theatres, a series of flagship Loew's movie palaces in the New York City area. It was designed by the architectural firm of Rapp ...
. The small complex of commercial storefronts that included the Tube Bar was demolished in early 2009 to make way for the
1 Journal Square
1 Journal Square is a skyscraper complex at Journal Square in Jersey City, New Jersey proposed by the Kushner Companies. The initial version consisted of two towers with roughly 3,000 residential units and 160,000 square feet of commercial space, ...
development project.
Legacy
*
Animator
An animator is an artist who creates multiple images, known as frames, which give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, and video gam ...
and
cartoonist
A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...
Matt Groening has described himself as a fan of the tapes, particularly the "Garden Grove calls". His series '' The Simpsons'' features a running joke of
Bart Simpson
Bartholomew JoJo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional character in the American animated television series ''The Simpsons'' and part of the Simpson family. He is voiced by Nancy Cartwright and first appeared on television in ''The Tracey Ullman Show'' ...
making prank calls to barkeeper Moe Szyslak, asking to speak to patrons with joke names. Groening describes the similarity between these jokes and the Tube Bar calls as "creative synchronicity." Co-developer Sam Simon told '' The Howard Stern Show'' in 2007 that the jokes are a "homage to or parody of the classic Red tapes".
* During the 1980s, several different record labels released various edits of the tapes on CD, LP and cassette tape before the Bum Bar Bastards came forward in the 1990s to claim copyright of the tapes and officially release their version.