Universal Remote Control

"What if you had a universal remote…that controlled your universe?"

— Tagline for Click

A form of Magic from Technology whereby a TV remote control works on reality itself. Somehow, the remote imbues its wielder with bonafide Reality Warper abilities, such as being able to control time with the pause, fast-forward, and rewind buttons, take away people's voices with mute, or even change the entire environment by "channel-hopping". Although, callous users may find out that Reality Warping Is Not a Toy.

Sister Trope to Rewriting Reality. See also Handy Remote Control, which is far more mundane.

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Examples

Advertising

• A couple of Pepsi commercials revolved around this trope.
  • A Diet Pepsi commercial features a woman fast-forwarding through a musical on her TV, before hitting the "reverse" button, which drains her glass of Diet Pepsi. She uses the remote to refill her drink, then decides to flip channels on her cat, changing to a dog and finally a handsome man, who she proceeds to spend time with.
  • Another Pepsi commercial features a boy watching Shakira perform on his TV. His sister calls him out, causing him to spill his Pepsi on the remote, which turns her into his mother who tells him to do his homework. The boy promptly changes channels on her, flipping to his father and then an old man dancing to the music, which he powers off. He then presses a button on the remote which zaps Shakira into his room, who proceeds to take his Pepsi and kiss him, then returns on the TV enjoying his drink. The old man suddenly reappears with the remote to the boy's surprise.
  • Also utilized in a commercial featuring Kylie Minogue with a similar premise to the above Shakira commercial.

Anime and Manga

• Doraemon has a remote-control shaped gadget (literally called the Universal Remote in some English translations) which allows the user to pause, rewind, or fast-forward their intended targets. It happens to be used in one manga issue that displays Nobita's jerkass moments, where Nobita asks for said remote with the excuse that he's rushing his homework and wants some extra time only to use it for playing pranks, including rewinding Suneo who's sketching near a park (cue a confused Suneo seeing the pencil drawing he spent an hour working on undoing itself), pausing Shizuka to peep at her changing and slowing down before beating up Gian after deliberately picking a fight with him. When Doraemon threatens to confiscate said remote, Nobita decides to just pause Doraemon instead, only for Doraemon to come prepared with a mirror - cue Nobita pausing himself, with a pissed-off Gian, Suneo and Shizuka approaching in the last panel.

Comic Strips

• Subverted in one Calvin and Hobbes daily, where Calvin turns off the TV with the remote and then, inspired, points it at his father and clicks.
  Calvin: [when his dad remains in place] Rats.
• One Rose is Rose comic strip has Jimbo teasing Pasquale by pretending to be affected by the TV remote.
  Jimbo: [walking into the room] Hey, Pasquale, what would happen if I pointed the remote control at myself and pressed "rewind"?
  [press]
  Jimbo: [walking backwards out of the room] "Rewind" pressed and myself at control remote the pointed I if happen would what, Pasquale, hey?
  Pasquale: MOMMM!!!
• Vid Kid had this as its central premise. The titular character had a VHS remote that applied its effects to reality. For example, hitting the pause button would freeze a person on a block of ice, rewind and fast forward could allow for time travel, and eject could remove a memory from someone's mind. Of course, the effects would be different depending on the context, giving Vid Kid New Powers as the Plot Demands.

Films — Animation

• Channel Chasers has Timmy wish for two of these, primarily so he can trap himself in TV land as a means of running away from home. The remotes can, among other things, pause time, erase memories, and change a person's age, and can affect both the TV world and the real world. Vicky gets her hands on one of the remotes and plans to use it to rewrite the Dictator Week specials on The Biographical Channel in order to turn herself into an actual dictator; the Bad Future seen at the beginning of the special is just a glimpse of what would happen if she were to succeed.

Films — Live-Action

• Click features Adam Sandler finding a universal remote at Bed, Bath, and Beyond that allows him to pause and fast-forward time, among other settings. The problem emerges when it turns out that it saves his preferences and starts acting on its own, deteriorating his relationship with his family and causing him to miss out on his entire life.
• Creepshow 3: The plot of the first segment, "Alice", centers on the title character's father finding one of these. Whenever Alice's father presses one of the buttons on the device, the whole family except for Alice changes ethnicity (i.e., the "Color and Hue Settings" button makes her family turn African-American, and the "Subtitles" button makes her family turn Hispanic).
• Epic Movie (2007) has a parody of the Click remote, which the characters use to win the battle of Narnia.
• In Funny Games, the TV remote is used to literally rewind the film so that Paul can stop the protagonists from foiling his scheme.

Literature

• Invoked by Misaki Shokuhou in A Certain Magical Index. She frequently uses a remote control to control people's minds; however, the mind control power comes from her own body/mind, the remote control is only there because she likes the idea of using it that way.
• The Goosebumps short story "Click" is about a boy who comes across an advertisement for a "Universal Remote Control" sold by The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday that works on reality itself. He quickly starts to abuse it for various petty reasons, like cheating on a school exam, which eventually alienates him from his best friend. At the end, he accidentally makes the world vanish when he presses the "OFF" button in frustration, only to find that the batteries have run out. This story was also adapted into an episode of Goosebumps (1995).
• In the Paul Jennings story "Spaghetti Pig-Out", a boy gets a remote that looks like a green chocolate bar that can control not only the VCR but people, flies, and cats.

Live-Action TV

• The Benny Hill Show: One sketch involves Benny finding out his tv remote has this power. He immediately starts abusing it for things like pausing his nagging wife, pausing traffic so he can cross a busy road, and fast-forwarding the weather to skip rain.
• Goosebumps (1995): The whole premise of "Click" is that Seth is given the Verona XG-20 Universal Remote Control, which gives him the powers of a Reality Warper. While he initially only uses it for mild pranks, he gradually becomes Drunk with Power when he realizes the full potential of the device.
• Round the Twist has an episode called "Spaghetti Pig-Out" based on the Paul Jennings story that features the remote that can control real life, although it lacks the "looking like green chocolate" attribute that it has in the book.
• The Upside Down Show has David give the audience an imaginary remote control that can do "heaps and heaps of really cool things", from pausing, rewinding, and fast-forwarding people, to flipping people horizontally and upside down, to making people stumble and do Irish dances.

Music

• The late 1990s Finnish electronic song "Freestyler", from Bomfunk MC, has a music video revolving around a teenager traveling the subway who realizes that his MP3 player has powers over reality and can pause, rewind, or fast-forward people around him. At the end, this proves ineffective on the two band members themselves, and after pressing the player in frustration the entire video rewinds back to the opening.

Theater

• Josh Wilder's play Leftovers features a Theo Huxtable (not Bill Cosby; don't call him that!) who manipulates reality with a remote control.

Web Animation

• In Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki uses a YouTube Remote to control the universe, which becomes the focus of the series' YouTube Arc. It can pause and fast-forward, lower people's resolution to make them unintelligible, change their language settings (which is how Meggy starts speaking English), and most terrifying of all, it can delete a user's channel and banish them to the Internet Graveyard, where they'll be beset by feral dead memes.

Web Originals

• This article from First Christian Church reflects about this theme and even mentioning Click and Bruce Almighty as references.
• In the SuperMarioLogan episode "The Remote!", Bowser Junior gets a remote control in his Happy Meal. This remote has the ability to pause time, change people's language from English to Spanish, fast-forward time, mute people, rewind time, and even age-restrict the episode.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Disaster", Rob gets a universal remote from The Awesome Store and uses it to ruin Gumball's life. However, Gumball manages to get to it and uses it to rewind time to the beginning of the day, kickstarting part two, "The Rerun".
• Dennis the Menace: In "Life in the Fast Lane", PeeBee invents a Time Tuner, which has the ability to alter real time. It can fast-forward it, rewind it, slow it down, or pause it. Dennis and PeeBee use the fast-forward function to help Henry read his 50-page report in time for work, help Alice wash the dishes in time for her soap opera, make Margaret's ballet recital more exciting, and help Mr. Wilson put up wallpaper in his den. When Mr. Wilson refuses to reward the boys with cookies for helping him, they use the rewind function on him as payback, getting him in trouble with his wife. Later, they use the slow-motion and pause functions to help the police catch and arrest a pair of bank robbers. At the end of the episode, Mr. Wilson asks Dennis and PeeBee to use the fast-forward function on him one last time so he can put the wallpaper up again. PeeBee does so, but the Time Tuner breaks, leaving Mr. Wilson stuck in fast-forward.
• Megas XLR: In the episode "Universal Remote", Coop builds the eponymous item, which is simply a normal TV remote control, but the villain of the week hears about it and mistakenly thinks the object has destructive power and wants to take it for himself.
• Pink Panther and Pals: In "Remotely Pink", the Pink Panther buys a universal remote after his normal TV remote breaks. It doesn't work on the TV, but it does allow him to control everything else around him.
• In Teen Titans (2003), Control Freak is a supervillain in possession of a reality-warping remote. He can use said remote to make inanimate objects come to life or to beam himself into TV land.
• The Simpsons: In the "Treehouse of Horror IX" short "The Terror of Tiny Toon", Marge takes the batteries from the TV remote to stop Bart and Lisa from watching an Itchy and Scratchy Halloween special and Bart replaces them with a piece of plutonium he finds in Homer's toolbox. Afterwards, the remote starts displaying reality-warping properties including messing with Lisa's skin color with the Color buttons, sending Bart and Lisa into the cartoon when Enter is accidentally pushed, and reversing time with its Rewind button.

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