‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Showrunners Explain that “Really Eerie” ‘Music Man’ Cold Open

IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1 opens with a nightmarish sequence of events that make what happened to little Georgie Denbrough and his paper boat look quaint.

**Spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 1, now streaming on HBO MAX**

The HBO show introduces us to a little boy named Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt) who is thrown out of a screening of The Music Man because he didn’t pay. The poor boy — sporting a shiner — decides to hitchhike in the cold, winter night. However, he’s not hitching a ride home, but as far away from Derry as possible.

When a nice “all-American” family picks him up, it looks like his luck has changed for good. They offer to give him a lift to Portland, Maine. As the minutes pass, the tension ramps up. The family begins to behave oddly, even disgustingly. Matty begins to freak out when he sees the car is re-entering Derry, but the horror is just beginning.

The pregnant mother soon gives gruesome birth to her baby, who is a flying bat monster that vaguely resembles Bill Skarsgård‘s Pennywise. The creature flies around the car, taunting Matty, as they arrive at a circus.

So what gives? What’s the deal with this utterly bananas cold open to IT: Welcome to Derry?

“We were just hoping to start the show in a way that felt both familiar and fresh,” series co-showrunner and episode writer Jason Fuchs told DECIDER. “Obviously the book, the movie, begins with Georgie being taken. So it felt appropriate to have Matty Clements have our first It abduction, but wanted to do it in a fresh way.”

Fuchs shared that he and fellow co-showrunner Brad Caleb Kane wanted to do the “inciting It kill” without the iconic clown.

“We wanted to do it without Pennywise. We wanted to see another manifestation of It and specifically a manifestation that took advantage of the fears of the time period,” Fuchs said. “It’s 1962. We’re in the heart of the Cold War. Fears over nuclear radiation and fallout and mutation and all those things combined. into us coming up with the sequence that you see at the beginning.”

Another nod to 1962 culture is the show’s opening shot. We hear a warped version of “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man play on a black screen. We soon find ourselves in the aforementioned Derry movie theater, where Matty is, yes, watching The Music Man.

IT: Welcome to Derry showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane were ecstatic to explain how the otherwise squeaky-clean movie musical made it into a new Stephen King adaptation.

“We both have a Broadway background. We’re both Broadway fans,” Fuchs said, before copping to the fact that both he and Kane were musical theater actors. (Kane even was the singing voice of Aladdin in the ’90s Disney animated film!)

“When we started talking about the opening, we actually initially entertained the idea of writing an original musical number, which quickly seemed like that was going to be a heavy lift,” Fuchs said. “I think the other thing we realized was we wanted this to feel grounded in the period. You know, there’s so much heightened stuff. There’s so many genre elements. We wanted something that made it feel really real to the moment. And so Music Man became the choice.” 

“Well, why did Music Man become the choice?” Kane asked. 

“Well, for two reasons,” Fuchs said. “We were looking through the list of properties that we could use. It came out in ’62 and then we also realized that opening, that song, ‘Ya Got Trouble.’” 

“‘Trouble, trouble, trouble,’” Kane echoed.  

“Just a perfect opening to hear that over black before the camera goes up on our opening scene,” Fuchs said. “It felt like a really eerie repurposing of an otherwise happy musical theater number.”

So eerie that you might not be able to watch The Music Man again without thinking of Pennywise.