Game Format

## Main game

### Opening Toss-Up

In the syndicated run of the show, a toss-up question was asked of all three players. The player who answered it correctly earned 5 points and initial control of the TV for Round 1. (For the MTV episodes, the starting player was chosen prior to the start of the show and no opening toss-up was used.)

### The First Two Rounds

Three contestants sitting in lounge chairs would select one of nine channels, each of which represented some topic having to do with pop culture. Sample channels used on the show were "The Bon Jovi Network", "Brady Physics", and "Dead or Canadian". Contestants answered a series of questions from those subjects to earn points. There were three questions in each channel/subject.

Some of the other straight question categories included "Leave Out the Beaver," "Private Dicks," "Bad TV," "Celebrity Cellblock," "Babes and Assassins," "PhD-TV," "No Witness News," "Celebrity Flesh," and "Inside Tina Yothers." In season five, "Inside Tina Yothers" was changed to "Inside Joe Piscopo." Season five also saw the debut of "Brady Metaphysics," a philosophy-driven spinoff of the "Brady Physics" channel.

In the first round, the first question for each channel was worth 5 points. The second question for the same channel was worth 10, and the final question was worth 15. These values doubled to 10, 20 & 30 in the second round.

#### Categories/Channels

*To see the list of channels click here.*

### Lightning Round

*To learn about the Lightning Round click here.*

### Final question (Season 5/Syndie Version Season 2)

The two remaining players bet any or all of their current score on one final question. Host Ober read a question, usually a math problem, and the players had 20 seconds to write down their answers while a strange act was performed. When time expired, the players' answers and wagers were checked; a correct answer awarded the wagered points to the contestant, while a wrong answer deducted said points.

The remaining player after all rounds won the game and advanced to the Grand Prize Round. In the event of a tie after the last round, a final question was retrieved from a giant Bob Eubanks Pez dispenser and asked of the players, with a correct answer winning the game. On the syndicated version, a question was pulled out of the Pez dispenser to determine control of the TV for Round 1.

## Spring Break episodes

Like most MTV shows of the period, *Remote Control* taped episodes on-location during the network's annual *Spring Break* event. The gameplay was altered to account for the absence of the regular studio's equipment and props as follows.

* In season 1, Contestants sat in director's chairs near the swimming pool while season 3 and 5 had contestant sat in beach chairs on platforms that extended over the edge of a swimming pool.

* The nine channels were represented by college-age men and women in swimwear and numbered T-shirts. When a channel was selected, that person removed his/her shirt to reveal a sash marked with the channel name.

* In some episodes, the contestants were given trays of snack food items (such as hot dogs) at the end of the first round and received 5 points for each one they ate before the second round ended. Once the extra points were tallied, the game ended and the two lowest scorers were pushed/thrown into the pool by stagehands. Other episodes followed the same elimination rules as the regular show, with the TV going "Off the Air" and the lowest scorer being tipped/pushed/thrown into the pool, followed by a lightning round to decide the winner.

* For the grand prize round, the winner lay in a floating lounge chair and had to identify the artists in nine music videos, each displayed for four seconds on a single monitor.

## Bonus Round

This is where the day's winner got to play for big prizes.

*To learn about the bonus rounds click here.*