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AV Club article- an oral history of Remote Control...

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JasonA1:
I loved the part where Howard Blumenthal and Dana Calderwood came in to be the proverbial wet blankets, turning the free associations into a producible format. The fact they were listened to is a testament to the process Then -  a nice harmony between new ideas and doing what works for the genre.

re: Brandon, yes it can be nice to get an outsider's perspective when developing a format, but I think the difference with Remote Control's development is that those people were subverting a genre they knew vis a vis the long-running daytime shows. Too often now, when fresh-out-of-college types contribute to classic or classic-adjacent shows, they're doing so with zero foundation whatsoever, and the results are nearly unusable. (First thing to wit, the people who jump from pure reality to game have to contend with the structure provided by the show's rules and format.)

And I know it was sort of the point of how Michael Dugan said it, but I wish the article writers made more of a meal out of how Remote Control blossomed into a home game, Nintendo game and syndicated series. The show hit a LOT of milestones for something one might consider a cult classic.

The part about MTV thinking they could always rebuild from scratch again was fascinating too. I think Ridiculousness finally did something for the network that they apparently wanted back in the mid-'80s - keep people from changing the channel hour over hour.

-Jason

Jeremy Nelson:

--- Quote from: colonial on February 23, 2021, 06:43:44 PM ----- The odd episode we discussed in the past where a group of contestants were all eliminated in the first round for being terrible, then replaced with a fresh set of contestants for Round 2 (there was also an episode where the entire first round was a Three Wise Men sketch, followed by regular contestants were round 2). Given what appeared to be a lack of S&P on this show, I'm curious what the internal reaction was to this.

--- End quote ---
I think this was linked on the article.

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