Otis Senior's death. At first, it almost seems like he'll be okay as his son is frantically driving him to the hospital while keeping him awake by having his father recite their horses' names. But then Otis shifts slightly, and viewers see the blood, and his speech continues to become more slurred and unintelligible. The next scene is Otis Senior's dead body on an autopsy table and OJ silently staring into the middle distance.
OJ and Em, along with their prized horse Lucky, get hired for a commercial shortly after their father's death. Not only does nobody on set respect the siblings, their experience, and their family's history, they don't even respect Lucky. The crew immediately start disrespecting Lucky's boundaries, pushing him closer to the edge until the horse suddenly kicks a light, startled by seeing his own reflection. The Haywoods are fired and ignobly replaced with a CGI horse, as if the whole thing was their fault.
While he tries to laugh it off by referencing Saturday Night Live's reenactment of the Gordy's Home incident, it is apparent that Ricky is greatly traumatized by the event. Besides him, this is also disheartening for Gordy himself. While he mauled his crew members in a violent rampage, Gordy only did so because he was frightened by the sudden bursting of the balloons. When he is done, he looks around, seemingly confused by his actions, before spotting Ricky. He proceeds to initiate the "exploding fist bump" with his friend but is quite literally shot down.
When Gordy looks at Ricky, pay attention to his sign language. He’s asking him "What happened to family?" Gordy was so angry that he didn’t realize who he was attacking.
Another sad detail is that we see Mary Jo wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of her younger self on it; clearly (and understandably), she hasn't been able to overcome her trauma any more than Ricky could.
Combination of this and Fridge Horror. The alien outfits and merchandise that Jupiter's Claim sells? They're covered in black hair and feature grotesquely large hands and white faces with small beady eyes. In other words, it's a chimpanzee. He's so deeply scarred by the event that he's seemingly unknowingly replicated it in his theme park.
The outfit's face also resembles that of the Panavision film reels. Ricky's trauma with a wild animal was made into a spectacle, and now he's making a spectacle of a wild animal.
There's also the fact that this universe's Saturday Night Live was so callous towards such a horrific event that they parodied it, further worsening Ricky's Stepford Smiler status. What's worse, this isn't so far from Truth in Television — the real version of SNL actually did a sketch about the mauling of Roy Horn by a tiger he used in his stage act.
The "Gordy's Home" incident, once contextualized through the footage immediately prior. As much as the cast and crew were neglectful/careless of Gordy's wellbeing, they otherwise seem like decent folks making a run-of-the-mill gimmick sitcom, at ease and comfortable with one another. Young Jupe flubs a line and receives nothing but encouragement from the off-camera director as well as his co-stars; Tom, playing his father, gives him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, and upon Gordy entering a rage, he personally attempts to make him stop only to get mauled for his trouble. None of them were terrible people, just uninformed and unlucky.
Ricky has become so desperate to reclaim his relevancy in the modern world, he tragically fails to learn the right lesson from the aforementioned Gordy incident and tries to revitalize himself by opening the Star Lasso Experience where he feeds horses to the UFO under the assumption he has tamed it. Unfortunately, Jean Jacket, agitated by dozens of humans looking directly at it (and possibly also by having gotten one of Ricky's plastic horses stuck in its "throat" the night before) instead sucks him, his entire family, his employees, and his audience into its body, where they are slowly digested over the course of hours.
OJ tries to keep his father's ranch from going under, while Emerald herself can't help but resent her father for not teaching her how to ride the horses.
OJ’s Heroic Sacrifice. At the start of the film, the siblings seem estranged and have differing opinions about how to handle the ranch’s financial situation. Nevertheless, we see that they do care about each other regardless. Emerald and OJ signal “I got my eye on you” before they’re forced to split, so Emerald can enact the rest of the plan. The ending of the film, where OJ comes out of the dust on Lucky, is quite emotional as a result.
In a way, Jean Jacket's death. Yes, it was a threat and it did eat a lot of innocent people. But it was also just a wild animal trying to live, like any other predator, and someone trying to exploit it directly resulted in its death. The fact that it only really became a threat due to Ricky keeping it in the area for so long that it claimed the place as its territory, to the point other people began noticing it, only adds to the tragedy.
This also ties in with Gordy's death: like Jean Jacket, he was a danger to humans and had to be destroyed for their safety. But just as Jean Jacket only became a danger when people tried to exploit it, Gordy too was a victim of the situation: a wild animal, meant to be in the jungle, being forced in captivity to act unnaturally until his co-stars saw him as a child or a pet, forgetting that he was still a wild animal. Neither the massacre at the sitcom studio or at the ranch was ultimately Jean Jacket or Gordy's fault: it was the fault of the people who, in their delusion, had the false impression that they were able to be controlled.
