The first TV remote control was a revolver-shaped light gun

Evidence

Within a year, McDonald’s engineers had come up with various answers to his challenge. Zenith put the most promising one into development, and soon started advertising its new Flash-Matic, mainly in print: “Just think! Without budging from your easy chair you can turn your new Zenith Flash-Matic set on, off, or change channels. You can even shut off annoying commercials while the picture remains on the screen.” The Flash-Matic shot visible light at four photo cells, one in each corner of the screen. It was shaped like a revolver, perhaps inspired by the popularity of the western. The idea, according to the inventor, Eugene Polley, was to let the viewer “shoot-out” the ads. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 510

Categorization

• CANDY: The original remote was literally a gun you aimed at the TV to shoot out ads — perfect dinner-party fun fact.
• BMF: The image of a viewer shooting a gun at a screen to annihilate unwanted content echoes the gunman-in-the-theater sequences in White Noise, but the resonance is mostly thematic gun-vs-media — borderline.