Late 70s and 80s slang, adj. As groovy and as it gets. Too cool to be just a passing fad, like saying tubular turned out to be.
Derived from a way cool 1973 album, titled
Tubular Bells, by
Mike Oldfield.
Vals picked up the word and that was the death of saying tubular. If it weren't for so many Vals saying, like tubular that other people associated it with
Valspeak, people wouldn't have become afraid to continue saying tubular when Valspeak went out of style.
Even now, Peeps are still
grooving to
Tubular Bells, and they figured out by the 80s that it wasn't just a passing fad, so anything groovy enough to
outlast a fad became tubular. It's too bad saying tubular wasn't tubular.