The bastion of comedy that is Saturday Night Live recently decided to poke fun at the close-by release dates of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake and GTA 6. The sketch marks the rare occasion the show acknowledges video games, bringing to mind a moment in 2021 where Elon Musk, of all people, showed up in a Wario suit.
If you need a reminder, Musk hosted Saturday Night Live on May 8, 2021, and one of the bits involved a lawyer defending Wario in court against the accusation he murdered Mario. Yeah, I don’t know either. The Tesla CEO himself was positioned as the villain of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, in a get up that included the moustache and all.
Discussing SNL’s latest venture into games satire, Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, both former senior marketing staff at the house of Mario and Zelda, looked back at the reaction to the Musk-led skit. “They did not like the Elon Musk 2021 [bit],” Yang says, in an episode of Kit and Krysta, the podcast they share.
“We were still there for that,” Ellis points out. “That did not go over well,” Yang states, as Ellis concurs that it “was not beloved” with a laugh.
“That one was out of left field,” Ellis observes. “There was no actual Nintendo product that connected to it.”
He mentions that “some of” the material was “getting into subject material that was uncomfortable for Nintendo.” The whole thing is misguided, in my view. Wario’s only ever been in direct opposition to Mario once – Bowser’s the jumping plumber’s actual arch-nemesis. Wario is just a bumbling, money-hungry inflection of Mario’s cheeriness. A courtroom drama is deeply antithetical to the spirit of either character, too.
The former Nintendo marketing leads point out in the conversation that the latest scene is more likely to have made execs smile, if only because it’s potentially potent marketing they didn’t have to pay for. Ultimately, that’s all that matters really – unless Musk is involved, anyway.