The main difference that most of your pop culture critics cite between old school MTV and the current version is that the new one doesn’t play a lot of videos. I’ve always thought the bigger discrepancy was the sense of production values – unlike the posh, shiny modern model, the original MTV, from its hosts’ hair to its sets, looked purposely like it was being made in your mother’s basement. And not the pretty, shiny refinished part, either. It was all uneven brick and cheerful shabbiness – and proud of it.

The difference was even clear in the programming – instead of dealing in the Barbie aspirations of “The Hills” and “The City,” or the crass excess of “My Super Sweet 16,” MTV’s first non-musical show was “Remote Control,” a lovingly low-production values pop culture game show hosted by comedian Ken Ober, and featuring the first glimpse of future stars Colin Quinn, Denis Leary and Adam Sandler. Ober, who died over the weekend after complaining of flu-like issues, was the chairman of a raucous, sometimes randy affair that was an absurdist mix of ’70s TV cheese fests like “Match Game” and “The Gong Show,” a kegger from a John Hughes movie, and a David Lee Roth video.

Oh, it was beautiful – contestants sat in shiny, flammable-looking recliners, on a set so cluttered that it clashed with itself. Ober, with the help of sidekick Quinn and a revolving door of babes (Marisol Massey, future soap stars Kari Whurer and Alicia Coppola and Susan Ashley), put the players through their paces with questions chosen from a choice of “channels,” which included “Inside Tina Yothers” and “Dead or Alive.” If you gave too many wrong answers, you weren’t just eliminated – you were yanked through the wall, flammable recliner and all. Shocking, stupid, and funny.

It was silly, a little wrong, and hilarious. It was also – and this is something rare in our irony-soaked society – a little sentimental under all the snark. Ober, the show’s theme song said, was obsessed with not only game shows, but with TV and pop culture in general, and so every slap they took at the plastic TV-dinner culture of the then-recent past also had a hidden good-natured wink in it. The show also had some of the most surreal 1980s entertainment moments outside of a Cars video, many of them courtesy of Sandler, who premiered some of his odd man-child characters like the Stud Boy, who would describe a celebrity he was supposedly intimate with, and the Trivia Delinquent.

Sandler may have been the flashy part, but Ober’s deadpanned enthusiasm made him what passed for the straight man, or as close as you can get on a set with a giant Pez head of Bob Eubanks and hostile recliners.

For a lot of then-young Gen-Xers, “Remote Control” was a celebration of the stuff  we thought we invented, like rudeness and snark, and the things our parents introduced us to, like game shows, a love of fun and prizes, and an earnest delight in not having to pretend we were too cool to like something. For me, it sparked my crushes on Colin Quinn (which has passed) and Denis Leary (which never, ever will).

Ober went on to host other shows, and to produce shows like “The Mind of Mencia” and “The New Adventures of Old Christine” – two shows that, like “Remote Control,” celebrated the synthesis of real life, surreal observation and shameless hilarity. To this day, I miss “Remote Control,” and I thank Ken Ober for his contribution to an MTV era that I can’t imagine now – when it had fun in not taking itself so seriously.