HAVE YOU MISSED THE 70S? GROOVY SONGS, SILLY SKITS RETURN ON DVD.

Byline: Greg Hernandez Staff Writer

In the 1970s, Tony Orlando and Dawn, the Captain & Tennille, and Sonny and Cher weren't just popular musical acts with hit records - they were network variety show stars who millions of viewers tuned into on television each week.

Now their shows, which had seemingly been locked away inside some sort of '70s time capsule, are being given a long-awaited encore on DVD as part of the nostalgia wave that continues to celebrate the groovy decade of disco balls, lava lamps and the Brady Bunch.

``The cool thing about a lot of these programs is that people did love them,'' said Brant Berry, vice president of R2 Entertainment, which is releasing the shows on DVD. ``They were before music videos and where you saw people do their hits.''

Boxed sets of sitcoms and dramas from the decade are already taking up plenty of space on store shelves, helping to fuel the TV-on-DVD boom, which had a growth spurt of nearly 50 percent during a 12-month period ending March 2005.

But these variety hours featuring songs, silly skits and plenty of guest stars are just arriving at the DVD party, which reached $21.1 billion in sales and rental revenue last year, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

``What is so great about the variety show is that in many cases, it is completely uncorrupted. It hasn't been worn out through syndication,'' observed Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. ``Many people haven't seen Captain & Tennille since the first time in the 1970s. With sitcoms and dramas, we don't think of them as being from the '70s because we have seen them thousands of times. Think of how many times you've seen an episode of 'The Brady Bunch.'''

Portland, Ore.-based R2 will release ``The Captain & Tennille Ultimate Collection'' on Tuesday. A Tony Orlando and Dawn collection hit stores last month, while a boxed set of Sonny and Cher's CBS variety hours came out in 2004.

Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille, the husband-and-wife team who make up the Captain & Tennille, were at the height of their popularity with such hits as ``Love Will Keep Us Together,'' ``The Way I Want to Touch You'' and ``Muskrat Love'' when then-ABC President Fred Silverman tapped them for a variety hour in 1976.

``All of these years, people have asked us when the show was going to come out on DVD,'' Tennille said this week. ``The problem was getting all of the music and other legal clearances. It just took forever. Carol Burnett (who also hosted a variety show) just put out the sketches and not the music because it is so difficult to get the rights.''

Airing on ABC opposite NBC's ``Little House on the Prairie'' and CBS' ``Rhoda,'' the variety show still managed to pull in solid ratings with more than 35 million viewers each week.

``There were only three networks back then, so people really knew you,'' Dragon said. ``There was no CNN around.''

The Grammy winners hosted such guests as Bob Hope, George Burns, Jackie Gleason, John Travolta and the original ``Charlie's Angels'' - Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith. But after a single season, the duo opted to focus on recording and touring again and began doing yearly ABC specials instead.

``We were asked to renew and do another season, but I was worried because we were running out of songs,'' Dragon recalled.

But the memory of the series has lasted for both the couple and their fans.

``A lot of the music that we put out there was positive,'' said Tennille. ``It had a positive point of view and people liked that. Not everyone is totally bummed out all the time!''

The Captain & Tennille DVD coincides with the release of their six original albums on CD for the first time and the duo has recorded a few new Christmas songs that are included in the DVD package.

For Tony Orlando and Dawn, the DVD revival of their CBS variety show actually led to a reunion of Orlando and his partners, Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent, in the recording studio after a 28-year hiatus. The trio that topped the charts with ``Tie A Yellow Ribbon,'' ``Knock Three Times'' and ``He Don't Love You'' will release ``Tony Orlando & Dawn - A Christmas Album'' on Tuesday.

It was after handling the advertising campaign for ``The Johnny Carson Ultimate Collection'' that Respond2 Communications launched its R2 Entertainment division. The Carson collection was sold exclusively through infomercials for three years before it became available at retail stores and has now passed 800,000 in sales.

R2 began releasing titles under its own banner starting with a collection of Bob Hope specials before moving on to the '70s variety series.

``I wanted to go after some of the shows I love and the first one was Sonny and Cher, which really paved the way for Tony Orlando and Dawn, Captain & Tennille, Donny and Marie and all the rest of them,'' said R2's Berry. ``It's not the kind of programming that is even on television anymore. The lost art of the variety show - it's gone.''

Other variety shows already released by R2 and other companies include ``The Brady Bunch Hour,'' ``The Flip Wilson Show'' and ``Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.''

R2 is producing a collective infomercial that will feature all its collections, including Carson, Hope, Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn and the Captain & Tennille. Plans are in the works for several other variety shows to be released next year including, possibly, Donny and Marie Osmond's ABC variety hour.

Original fans already have an appetite for entertainment from their youth, but such shows as VH1's ``I Love the '70s'' and the sitcom ``That '70s Show'' have made the era appealing to a younger generation as well.

Thompson said powerful nostalgia waves tend to happen in 20- to 30-year cycles. Shows set in the 1950s, such as ``Happy Days'' and ``M*A*S*H,'' became big hits in the 1970s. This was followed by a plethora of '60s revivals in the '80s.

``The '70s are interesting in that we had a '70s revival in the '90s, right on schedule, but the '70s thing is hanging on,'' he said. ``It was the last decade where every single one of us shared the same culture. We were all still feeding from the same mass-cultural trough. If you were a kid in the '70s, everyone was watching the same thing and hearing the same music.

``I think it was the last decade that was purely itself. The clothing, the music, the TV shows - you can't mistake it.''

Greg Hernandez, [phone]

greg.hernandez(at)dailynews.com

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(1 -- 3 -- color) Variety shows starring Tony Orlando and Dawn, below; Sonny and Cher, right; and the Captain & Tennille, far right, are available on DVD for today's fans of yesterday's shows.