Congratulations on making it to the end of another week! Unfortunately, these people didn't. Light a candle for Funeral Friday.
Nothing against Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek—it's just that their demographics skewed decidedly older—but to children of the ’80s, there were really only two game show hosts that really mattered: Marc Summers of Double Dare and Ken Ober of Remote Control. The latter was a special kind of game show host we’d rarely seen before—flippant, sarcastic bordering on surly, and unafraid to mock everything from the deliberately pointless questions he was asking, to the contestants who nevertheless failed to answer them correctly, to his own role as the ringmaster of a show that not only celebrated junk culture but unabashedly reveled in it. Remote Control may have only lasted five seasons, but it managed to cram in an awful lot of living, coming up with unique, irreverent ways to turn hoary old trivia into something that felt fresh and even borderline rebellious. A lot of that had to do with its supporting cast of characters—including future stars Denis Leary, Adam Sandler, and Colin Quinn—who would act questions out in signature skits like “Stud Boy” and “Sing Along With Colin,” and other generally weird shit that would probably never make it past a board of producers these days. Like “Beat The Bishop,” where a contestant had to solve a math problem before a guy dressed as a bishop could run around the studio, or the “Snack Break,” where Ober fed contestants by dropping stuff like frozen egg rolls on their heads.
But it was Ober himself that best defined Remote Control, and it was his personality that made the show’s rampant silliness seem both cool and smart. In fact, Remote Control was framed as an extension of Ober himself, as anyone who listened to the opening theme song could tell you: It supposedly took place in his basement at 72 Whooping Cough Lane—hence the washer-and-dryer hanging out on set, and the occasional interruption from “Ken’s mother”—and its back story was a sort of King Of Comedy play on Ober’s lifelong idolization of game show hosts like Bob Barker and Bob Eubanks (whose smiling heads could be seen in every episode, adorning the wall just over Ober’s shoulder). That much was true; Ober really had grown up worshipping game show hosts, although he got his first big break as a stand-up contestant on Star Search before MTV handpicked him to captain its very first nonmusical show. (Not that Ober should be blamed for stuff like Room Raiders or Real World/ Road Rules Challenge, by any means, but he did pave the way.)
Ober’s Remote Control gig also earned him some unexpected friends—like Blues Traveler, who cast him in three of their videos—and landed him a plum series of commercials for Jenga, but it also more or less caused his career to hit a premature creative peak. He spent much of the ’90s into the early part of this decade hosting lesser fare like Comedy Central’s revival of Make Me Laugh and ESPN’s Perfect Match, as well as a short-lived L.A. radio show that oddly paired him with former Brady Bunch star Susan Olsen. In recent years, he had moved entirely behind the scenes, working as a producer for his old partner on Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, consulting on The New Adventures Of Old Christine, and finally, writing and producing 36 episodes of Mind Of Mencia. Earlier this week, Ober became the subject of a sudden Internet rumor denying his death; it was the first time the modern, usually wrong “crowdsourcing” method of gathering information has been used to spread a rumor denying a celebrity’s passing. Sadly, those rumors of Ober’s death turned out to not be greatly exaggerated. He had complained of flu-like symptoms to friends before disappearing over the weekend; on Sunday, his body was discovered in his Santa Monica home. Ken Ober was 52 years old, and sadly he’s now dead—not Canadian.