Jordan Peele shares opening credits to Nope’s in-universe sitcom Gordy’s Home!
Ricky "Jupe" Park stars in the fictional sitcom that inspired the unforgettable SNL sketch
[The following contains spoilers for Jordan Peele’s Nope]
The mythology of Jordan Peele’s Us heavily leaned on Hands Across America, a real-life fundraising event that did not involve wearing a red jumpsuit and stabbing your doppelgänger but did raise $35 million (nearly half of which actually went to charity!), but for Nope—which debuted at the top of the box office charts this week—Peele invented his own pop culture touchstone to hang the movie on.
We’re referring to Gordy’s Home!, a fictional ‘90s sitcom in the universe of Nope that got good ratings and pretty good reviews in its first season but ended—and became a morbidly fascinating artifact for freaks who want to sleep in a room full of Gordy’s Home! memorabilia—after one of the chimps playing Gordy snapped and brutally killed several members of the cast. Though never explicitly shown onscreen, survivor Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun as an adult) says it was immortalized in what sounds like a pretty incredible Saturday Night Live sketch (with Chris Kattan as Gordy).
Today, Peele shared a clip of the Gordy’s Home! opening credits, which seem perfectly pleasant and normal out of context, save for the bootleg VHS-style screen distortions, which are always going to be spooky to younger generations. In fact, the clip is even surprisingly light on Easter eggs for Nope, which helps make it feel more like a real thing from that universe and not a DVD extra, but there are a few things to note: The mom and dad on Gordy’s Home! are involved in the space program in some way (space is where UAPs come from!), there’s a quick moment of young Jupe (Jacob Kim) hiding under a table that is just a bit chilling, and the credits end with a shot of Jupe and Gordy doing their famous exploding fist-bump.
Gordy’s Home! isn’t specifically important to the actual plot of Nope, but it is thematically important for the stuff the movie has to say about TV and movies and how we make TV and movies and how people get swallowed up by the act of making TV and movies… so to speak.