Jordan Peele drops VHS-style opening credits for 'Nope' sitcom 'Gordy's Home'

Jordan Peele's third feature film, Nope, finally arrived last weekend after solid reviews, and managed to land in the top spot at the box office along the way. Like his previous films, Get Out and Us, this tale of a pair of siblings (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) and their quest to capture a UFO that's stalking their California ranch is packed with storytelling layers, including a dark backstory for one particular character. Now, Peele is sharing a key piece of that backstory with fans. 

**SPOILER WARNING! Spoilers for Nope ahead!**

Former The Walking Dead star Steven Yeun makes quite an impression in Nope as Ricky "Jupe" Park, a former child actor turned theme park owner and showman whose attraction, Jupiter's Claim, is located near the Haywood's Hollywood Horses Ranch. We're introduced to Jupe when the film reveals that OJ Haywood (Kaluuya) is selling some of the family horses to him, and later we watch him die when he and his entire theme park audience are sucked up into the UFO's cavity and apparently devoured. This tragic end is the conclusion of a long, dark arc for Jupe, one that began when his acting career was marred by death.

After starring in the Western-themed Kid Sheriff, Jupe landed a role on a sitcom called Gordy's Home, about a family who lives with the titular chimp (played in motion capture by Terry Notary), but the sitcom was cut short when a mishap on set one day caused Gordy to turn violent and attack the cast. Some of Jupe's co-stars were killed, while others were left permanently disfigured. Jupe was unharmed physically, but he witnessed the whole thing, and was about to give what might have been a calming fist bump to Gordy when police shot the animal. 

Gordy's rampage and the impact it made on Jupe have a major role to play in Nope's larger exploration of showbusiness and spectacle, and Peele and his cast and crew went to great lengths to recreate the feel of a multicamera sitcom that dedicated fans might have preserved on VHS tapes. To prove just how deep the Gordy's Home design got, the director dropped the opening credits sequence to his Twitter account over the weekend, which you can check out below. 

There's something inherently just a little bit unsettling about finding an obscure piece of sitcom lore like this somewhere on the internet, especially if you barely remember the show. It's like you maybe, just for a second, stumbled into an alternate dimension, and Peele and company have captured that feeling perfectly here.

With the added brutal backstory, everything about the Gordy's Home credits feels unsettling, from the space-themed opening, to the way we see young Jupe (Jacob Kim) sitting under the same table where he watched Gordy slaughter his co-stars, to the subtle drops in the soundtrack. It's a very creepy addition to an already creep film, and now we're wondering if the eventual Nope Blu-ray will include even more Gordy's Home strangeness.

Nope is in theaters now.