Kidnapped and imprisoned in an underground doomsday cult at the age of 14, the titular star of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt re-enters modern American life following 15 years of seclusion.

Naturally, the world she and her fellow “Mole Women” find themselves in is very different from the one she once knew. It’s a world in which crazy news stories like hers are no longer just reported on ad nauseam but put through the ringer of the Internet, where they are shared, commented on, turned into memes, diced, spliced and deconstructed into entirely new, strange and even absurdist forms that can be just as popular as the original story and sometimes more so.

It’s a world in which her triumphant tale can be turned into something like this:

Many will recognize in that remarkable sequence, with its heavy application of auto-tune and jump-cuts, the stamp of the Gregory Brothers, whose viral videos “songifying” the news – including “Bed Intruder Song” and “Winning” – have garnered hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. Evan Gregory, keyboardist and vocalist for the group, told Brief that Kimmy Schmidt co-creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock knew they wanted a Gregory Brothers feel for the scene from the start.

“That concept of the [Mole Women] coming out of the bunker, being on the news and immediately going viral was this really cool idea to introduce the characters to the audience,” he said. “You go viral and then what happens after that?”

But though Fey and Carlock craved that Gregory Brothers magic, they didn’t expect to actually have it, but rather to pay homage to it.

Originally bound for NBC, the show’s pilot was shot and edited long ago, and composer/executive producer Jeff Richmond had already created a Gregory Brothers-like theme song using the hilarious rants of the Walter Bankston character, played by comedian Mike Britt. The intent was to not only use the song for the opening scene, but to break it down into the show’s title sequence as well. It was only when the producers brought in design firm Pentagram to craft the graphics for the titles that the opportunity to incorporate the genuine article presented itself. For unbeknownst to them, one of Pentagram’s lead designers was a friend of the Gregory Brothers, and could pull the strings necessary to get them on board.

“We went to [Kimmy Schmidt’s producing team] saying ‘let’s not make a copy of the thing, let’s make the real thing,‘” said Pentagram partner Emily Oberman, who headed up the title graphics. “Our idea was to bring in the Gregory Brothers because they do it for real, and they could take Jeff’s song and enhance it further so that it could be this meta-thing where they were using the real people to make the fake story into a real thing that people could access through YouTube.”

What resulted form this unexpected collaboration is one of the most unusual yet addictive title sequences in recent memory (a descriptor that actually applies to most of the Gregory Brothers’ body of work.)

For Pentagram’s part, Oberman said she saw part of their role as creating “more of a voice for the show,” which had to feel like a viral Gregory Brothers event, but which also had to “feel like a traditional opening sequence for a show. They wanted it to have the trappings of a real TV show.”

To that end, Pentagram “ended up crating those big color fields that are all based on Kimmy’s colorful outlook and wardrobe,” said Oberman. “Then we added a sprinkling of fairy dust because Tina [Fey] was always saying she’s kind of like a Disney character in the real world, with this sparkly outlook on the world.”

The brightly colored backdrops and their bold title cards bounce into frames like the protagonist bounces through life. Even the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt logo derives its look and feel from Kimmy, whose uplifting personality and narrative arc manifest in its “growing, coming out of the ground, stepping up,” Oberman said. The syllables of “Unbreakable” themselves grow and vibrate with Kimmy’s joie de vivre, culminating with the word “able,” which “we really liked in terms of her pluckiness,” said Oberman.

Meanwhile, the Gregory Brothers primary duty was to serve as “viral video consultants,” said Evan Gregory, which involved putting the finishing songification touches on the Walter Bankston interview, and cutting the video of the “news” footage with other clips to make a video that looked just like the ones they do on YouTube.

Gregory said that Bankston portrayer Britt knew on the day of the sequence’s shoot that his words would be turned into an auto-tuned segment, a foresight the subjects of their videos do not typically get to have. This meant the comedian could go big with his line deliveries, providing versions of lines such as “They alive, dammit” and “Females are strong as hell” that worked beautifully as songified lyrics. In addition, Gregory said that Britt’s particular vocal tone was a pleasure to auto-tune.

“What you can draw out of a voice is highly dependent on both the sonic properties of that voice and the emotional properties of the delivery,” he said, “and Walter Bankston’s voice is somewhere between Aretha Franklin and Sam Smith. He had this wonderful tone in his voice, almost as if he’s projecting and already singing but he has that charismatic gravel of a James Brown or a Joe Cocker.”

Visually, the archival clips the Gregory Brothers interspliced with the titles range from an old photo of star Ellie Kemper to random videos of children in various states of play.

“What we liked is that all the clips were of people stumbling then getting back up,” Oberman said. “They’re all meant to evoke Kimmy and Titus’ spirit and do it in a way that is about nostalgia since her story is so much about getting back into her life where she left off as a 14 year old. They reference a past that is just coming back into focus.”

Working with the Gregory Brothers not only lent authenticity to the original scene and subsequent title sequence for Kimmy Schmit, but it was a savvy cross-marketing move in that most of the group’s YouTube videos receive millions of views at their schmoyoho account. An extended cut of the video (featuring the Gregory Brothers themselves) currently headlines the page, and had already received more than 1 million views at the time of this writing.

“We had fun with it,” said Gregory. “We knew that the extended version was going to be important for the conversation happening online but wasn’t going to be appearing in the show, so that took the pressure off to just have fun and do whatever we felt like.”

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