Remote

A remote control, also called a remote, a television remote, a TV remote, or a clicker, is an an electronic device that can be used to operate another device, usually a television. Remote controls are long and plastic, with buttons across the top performing various functions. They operate wirelessly and on battery power.

Function

The modern remote control is essentially an electric wand. Its batteries provide it with energy, which it uses to manipulate the probability that a television screen will be showing a given combination of pixels at a given time. In accordance with Moore’s Law, the number of buttons on a remote control tends to grow exponentially, doubling every year. As the amount of buttons increases, the value of any one button decreases, approaching a limit of total uselessness. As a result, remote controls are projected to fall significantly in value as actively detrimental buttons begin to be added by the year 2025. There are, however, extremely useful functions that have not yet received corresponding buttons on any remote. Remote theorists speculate that the most useful button will not be feasible until 2064.

Creation

Main article: History of the television, 1912-2112

Pre-Halloween

Before the creation of remotes, wizards would entertain themselves by manipulating actors on a stage. This process was highly taxing on these wizards, who needed to maintain active and complete concentration while simultaneously devising a complete story. This was fun for the spectators, but the wizards hated it.

Attempts to automatically or algorithmically manipulate the actors resulted in bizarre and often horrific performances. These strange performances were outlawed by the Wizard Council in 1902, and remain banned through the present day.

Alexander Graham Bell would later, in 1912, invent the television as a means to create new images. The television would display random assortments of colors and shapes with no pattern, changing ten-- and later thirty, and then sixty-- times a second. These “performerless plays” became the subject of much public fascination as televisions became more readily available. While the shapes were completely random, an uptick in apophenia caused many of these plays' spectators to attempt to discern truths from the meaningless information being broadcast. Spectators would get into gruesome brawls betting over which shapes would appear, so transfixed by the flat images on the surface in front of them that they began to ignore the rest of reality.

Naturally, as with all captive audiences, the wisdom of the time dictated that the television fans' obsession could be exploited for profit. Manipulating actors was taxing, but manipulating shapes was easy. Clever wizards of the time began with subtle tricks: occasionally manipulating probability to make triangles appear more often than squares, or red appear more often than blue, or similar such bends in the flow of reality. The period of time in which these tricks were unknown to the public is now known as the "kayfabe era" of television. The "kayfabe era" unceremoniously ended when a mischevious wizard (best known for other work) tricked its colleagues into revealing their secret in front of an audience of 10,000 aberrant creatures that they had believed to be wizards in funny disguises. This event would later become known as the Halloween Goof.

Post-Halloween

After the Goof, the probability manipulation industry exploded. Audiences demanded an increasing number of shows, with increased capacity, and newer, funnier shapes every time. At the same time, Nikola Tesla was well into his attempt to create a home consumer magical product that non-magical people could use. On April 1, 1999, Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell released the result of their combined labors: the first television remote. Measuring over ten stories tall, the device served as a "portable" wizard tower containing a 24/7 staff of wizards casting extremely intensive probability-manipulation spells to bend the television's images into incredibly complex and detailed shapes. Some of these shapes were so detailed that they could be heard. The wizard tower was on wheels, allowing it to be pushed around from village to village.

The next day, on April 2, 1999, Girl Nikola Tesla and Alexander "Girl" Bell used their own combined invention, a shrink ray, to steal the wizard tower by shrinking it down until it could fit into their shared pocket. The wizards, tired of being tall guys, decided that they liked being small guys after all. Tesla and Bell, capitalizing on this, hired more tall wizards to become little guys in tiny little towers. Where else can you get an experience like that? Being a tall guy's hard. You don't get to be a small guy when you're a tall guy. It just doesn't happen. Not unless you get to be in one of these little small guy towers.

On April 3, 1999, however, Girl Nikola Tesla and Alexander "Girl" Bell's empire crumbled. They were manufacturing more little small guy towers, hiring tall guys by the hundreds, when two interlopers appeared in wizard hats and fake beards: Girl Girl Nikola Tesla and Alexander "Girl" Girl. Girl and Tesla, just before getting shrunk down, presented their own combined invention: a freeze ray. Freezing the tiny towers, as well as their normal-sized creators, made it trivial for the pair to steal hundreds of frozen towers and bring them to the world's largest duplication machine.

On April 4, 1999, millions of tiny wizard towers flooded the market. The television industry would never be the same. However, the first generation of mass-produced television remotes had a major flaw: the frozen wizards kept melting, and dripping through holes in the tiny masonry of the towers. As a result, Tesla and Girl devised a button-down tower with the help of notable architect Frank "Girl" Wright. This tower kept all the wizards safely inside, giving them the opportunity to refreeze during the cold winter months. This generation's design would persist in all future iterations, giving scholars cause to consider these buttoned towers the first "real" television remotes.

In popular culture

As a common and beloved thing, remotes are ubiquitous in popular culture. In the Wiki Camp 2, for example, they appear throughout many of the 200 scenes comprising the show's first season. Below are a selection of notable remote appearances.

Episode 3 (War Recent Changes)

• During Drake's final unaltered appearance, before he encounters The Divine Goddess, he is searching for his remote. As he does this, he wonders aloud: "Now, if I was a remote, where would I be...?" (Drake's remote does not appear until Episode 5, however.)

Episode 4 (But Here's The Corresponding Hole:)

• During the cold open, a remote is visible among the other devices present on Hal Emmerich's desk. Positioned a dirty shovel and a robotic arm, the remote is significantly larger than many of its time, likely containing twice as many wizards as other iterations of the device. Emmerich adds more wizards to the remote, sobbing and shaking his head, before removing his wallet from his pocket to look at a picture inside. Sighing, he resumes tinkering with the remote. Just before the title sequence, he closes the panel on the remote and presses one of its buttons, causing one of the arm's fingers to wiggle slightly.
• After the title sequence, when Statler and Waldorf return home from the Edit War, a remote is present on the table. Statler nearly picks it up to turn on their television before Waldorf puts his hand on top of Statler's, gently pushing the remote back onto the table. The remote is present throughout the remainder of the scene.
• When Michael Bloomberg begins removing all of the electronics from his house, tearing wires out of the walls and throwing appliances into his backyard, a remote is briefly visible amid the heap of debris.