YMMV / Remote Control

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• Franchise Original Sin: On a network-wide level, this was the first show MTV ever aired that wasn't about music. At the time, it was easy to forgive, since it still had the countercultural vibe that characterized the network's programming in the late '80s (and, in all fairness, MTV was a regular category in the main game, and the endgame was entirely about identifying music videos), but once The Real World took off and MTV started pivoting away from music, it became harder to look at this show and not see it as MTV's Start of Darkness.
• Fridge Brilliance: There's a very good reason why a "Zenith" TV was chosen as the game board for the show, called "Remote Control": Zenith was the inventor of the remote control device. Also counts as Genius Bonus.
• Growing the Beard: Starting with Season 2, especially.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the channels was "Celebrity Square", which was allegedly their "cut-rate" version of The Hollywood Squares, because MTV could only afford a single square. In 2012, MTV2 aired the latest incarnation of that show, Hip-Hop Squares.
• Memetic Mutation: A variant in that it made a meme out of singing "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" as a Crowd Song.
• Seasonal Rot: The final season (1991), with several major rule changes, a new intro (instead of the Expository Theme Tune, an intentionally-overdramatic montage showing the cast getting ready for the show) and a very peevish Ober (partially because of a work schedule that by now involved constantly flying between West and East Coasts). The final episodes, which were filmed at MTV's Spring Break event, didn't even have Ober doing hosting duties.
• Special Effect Failure: On some occasions, the Off the Air mechanisms didn't quite work. One time, the player on the right's rotating wall panel got stuck (with Ober joking he'd broken the set), while another time, the player on the left's floor chair had difficulty rotating vertically (making Ober question the player's weight).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Theme Tune had a little more than a passive resemblance to The Ohio Players' "Fire".
  • Depending on the channel, the organ tune that would accompany it would sound similar to the series' theme song or network jingle (ie- "The Movie Network" sounded similar to the tune of HBO's famous "Starship" intro).
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The NES game endlessly loops the title theme from the moment you start it, and there's no bonus round feature; while there was no way to replicate the music video finale of the show, a lack of a replacement makes every game finish anti-climactically (whoever has the most points after 3 rounds simply wins the game).
• Troperrific: It's only natural that a show about TV trivia with the world's biggest fanboy as host and parodies of nearly every game show in the book is going to fall under this category.

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