Some of the most unsettling moments in Jordan Peele‘s Nope don’t come from the sky but from the past. Steven Yuen‘s Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park harbors a very traumatic past as a child actor who experienced tragedy on the set of the sitcom “Gordy’s Home!” told in flashbacks.
Today Peele took to Twitter to reveal the fictional sitcom’s opening credits, giving more context to Gordy the chimpanzee:
— Jordan Peele (@JordanPeele) July 24, 2022
Some spoilers ahead for Nope.
In Jupe’s flashbacks, the sound of a balloon popping during the filming of a birthday-themed episode sent Gordy into an aggressive frenzy, brutally attacking his human costars. While the above sitcom opening emulates the irreverent sitcoms of the ’80s, an insidious undercurrent explains more about Gordy’s history before entering the entertainment business.
The title card is set over an image of a rocket launched into space, a likely nod to Ham the chimpanzee, named after the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center. Ham was the first chimp sent to space in 1961. Ham was the chosen candidate of forty chimpanzees, and he was retired to a zoo in 1963 after an almost seventeen-minute voyage flight.
Flashbacks in Nope also hint at Gordy’s space background, and it’s more subtext to how people -and animals- become cogs in the wheel, only to be discarded and forgotten later no matter their scars.
In Nope, “Residents in a lonely gulch of inland California who bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.”
Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) will be reteaming with Peele on the mysterious movie, with the cast also including Yeun (“The Walking Dead,” Mayhem) and Keke Palmer (“Scream”). Michael Wincott (The Crow), Barbie Ferreira and Brandon Perea also star.
Nope is part of a “five-year exclusive production partnership” Universal Pictures inked with Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions, and it’s been described as a “horror event.” Mind you, anything from Peele at this point is instantly an event, but we can probably expect Nope to be Peele’s biggest movie to date, with an announced IMAX optimization. On that note, the film’s cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema, whose previous work includes Let the Right One In, Spectre, and the Christopher Nolan films Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet.
Nope is out in theaters now.