‘Stuart Fails To Save The Universe’ EPs & Composer On Show’s Ever-Changing Title Sequence You “Shouldn’t Skip”, Packed With Messages & Spoilers

SPOILER ALERT: The story includes a detail about the premiere episode of HBO Max’s Stuart Fails To Save the Universe.

Each episode of The Big Bang Theory spinoff Stuart Fails To Save the Universe tells a story of its four protagonists, Stuart (Kevin Sussman), Denise (Lauren Lapkus), Bert (Brian Posehn) and Kripke (John Ross Bowie), traveling to another alternate reality as they try to fix the device built by Sheldon and Leonard and the multiverse Armageddon it created.

Each episode’s opening credits also tell their own story via a series of fourth wall-busting amusing messages to the viewer embedded into the animated title sequence set to a differently arranged theme song by Danny Elfman. The series of notes are capped by a spoiler, which in the Episode 1 credits reads “Barry Dies.”

Who is Barry? He turned out to be Denise’s boyfriend in post-apocalyptic Pasadena who dies pretty meaninglessly when he says “Follow me!” and charges first into the heavily guarded CalTech, leading Stuart and Bert, joined by Denise, in their mission to break in and take Sheldon and Leonard’s machine.

While the title sequence spoiled one death, the series’ premiere featured a bigger, more shocking killing of an original Big Bang character, Raj (Kunal Nayyar), who had been imprisoned at CalTech by Barry Kripke (Bowie). You can read all about it here.

Deadline asked Stuart Fails To Save the Universe creators Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady and Zak Penn about the clever, custom title sequences.

DEADLINE: Was this about one of you being really unhappy with the streaming culture of people skipping opening credits?

LORRE: Me.

PRADY: Chuck said people make these brilliant opening credit sequences that people watch one time.

LORRE: And then you can click on the button that says ‘Skip Titles’, and I went, “Well, it’s a terrible waste of time and money and creativity. What if we made a title sequence that you could skip but you shouldn’t? And that would mean every title sequence have to be different and worth watching. And then we got a gift from the gods when Danny Elfman said yes, I’ll write a theme and produce a theme song, and he rearranged it and and remixed it and did variations on it throughout the 10 episodes as well, so the end result was a title sequence that hopefully is surprising and fun to watch.

DEADLINE: And the spoiler part, where did it come from? Chuck, was it you again? Because some of them are really spoilers; ‘Barry Dies’ is a real spoiler.

PENN: Yeah, that was I think something we all liked the idea of right off the bat is, why not? Who cares? We were like, let’s try it. Let’s just see what happens if we put a spoiler in the title, and we were just trying to keep ourselves entertained and do things that were different.

PRADY: I mean, not much more than it made us laugh, the notion that, especially in the online television watching culture, there’s all of this stuff about spoilers, people hunting for spoilers, people trying to avoid spoilers. What if there’s a spoiler and it’s just sort of kind of meaningless?

PENN: Also, I always felt like if we say “Spoiler: Gary Dies,” a lot of people are going to think, well, It’s not going to be that simple. So it would still be shocking when he actually does die. I’m counting on people being cynical about it.

LORRE: I’m counting on people laughing.

PRADY: The answer to a lot of questions is because it made us laugh, and we hope it makes other people laugh.

DEADLINE: Some of the spoilers are really mild, but this one was like, first: who’s Gary?, and then it was that simple, he just died.

PRADY: He died, didn’t he? And he really just died.

PENN: Yeah, it’s just totally pointless.

LORRE: “Follow me.”

PRADY: “Follow me.” Oh.

Musical Variations

The Simpsons theme composer Elfman recalled “the crazy thing” that happened after he was asked to write main title music for Stuart Fails To Save the Universe and, as a Big Bang fan, agreed to do it.

“I wrote it, Chuck loved it, and he said, ‘So here’s the thing. I need you to do 10 variations on it,’” Elfman said. “I thought about it for two seconds. No one’d ever asked me to do that before but I just said, ‘You got it.’”

And he did it, drawing inspiration from the particular episode for its unique theme music.

“It wasn’t even difficult,” he said. “Each episode, just mix it up and try things. It was really just fun.”