Many fans know Pedro Pascal as Mando or Joel Miller in The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, but now fans saw him in his most comedic role yet, Mario. The Chilean and American actor was brought on SNL as its latest host to play the famous Nintendo character for its latest dystopian Mario Kart skit.
The NBC late night scripted comedy show has been on the air since 1975 and has produced one of the most entertaining late-night comedy shows for generations of fans. This latest skit begins with a pre-recorded segment asking the question of what an HBO adaptation of the Nintendo game Mario Kart would look like. What happened next caught everyone off guard.
In the mock trailer, it starts by referencing the popular video game to HBO’s show adaptation of The Last of Us and proceeds to reference it as “a prestige dystopian drama.” Audiences can only infer what happens next when the first shot of their so called “adaptation” features a dusty old Bullet Bill in the ground. Then we see someone trying to look for someone who will be willing to smuggle Princess Peach played by SNL’s Chloe Fineman (Big Mouth, Twisted Metal) across Rainbow Road. In dramatic fashion, Pascal in a Mario costume says the classic lines of the iconic plumber, “It’s-a me, Mario.” The tone in his voice as this edgy dramatic character made audience members laugh and fans online went into a frenzy.
The trailer goes on as this dystopian Mushroom kingdom is infected by a rogue fungus, just like in The Last of Us. A sick shot of the red Super Mario Go-Kart is then shown on screen, and with Peach in the passenger’s seat, Pascal’s delivery of “Let’s a-go” sends both of them off into the Mushroom Kingdom finding all of Mario’s friends. Throughout the trailer, the audience sees Luigi with his gun, a real life Poltergust 3000 to fight off the goombas and ghouls that roam around. Yoshi and Toad also appear and would subsequently say they are “bi-sexual”. Bowser is once again the big baddie since he took over the Kingdom 10 years prior, and after moments of racing montages, Mario seems to be addicted to shrooms in order to get bigger. Throughout this trailer, fans of both franchises found this comedically thrilling and hysterical, all while making jokes and breaking people’s expectations of what these PG characters are usually like in the games, and even in the case for the upcoming Nintendo and NBCUniversal collaboration on The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
SNL did not hold back on anything with this skit, as even the spoof-reviews were hilarious to fans. Right from the trailer itself, it parodied Variety in saying, “HBO picked up the wrong game to do this with”, as well as The New York Times saying, “This aint it.” The ironic twist of reverse psychology shows how much of a phenomenon the new show has spread. With much of the world focused on the recent tragedies in Ukraine and elsewhere, many people feel The Last of Us might not be a far-off reality.
Pascal goes on the show again by highlighting his upbringing and how he made it to the United States. “I was born in Chile and nine months later my parents fled [dictator] Pinochet and brought me and my sister to the U.S.” “…They were so brave and without them, I wouldn’t be here in this wonderful country and I certainly wouldn’t be standing here with you tonight. To all my family watching in Chile, I just want to say, ‘Te amo, te extraño y deja de dar mi información personal,’ which means, I love you, I miss you and stop giving out my phone number.” via. Deadline
Besides that, the whole series is a fun watch for video game lovers to die-hard fans of dystopian dramas. That also only encompasses a fraction of the audience who will go on to watch this skit days after, including fans of the Nintendo series and young adults who grew up playing the Super Mario games. The parody trailer was posted on YouTube and is trending with 1.6 million views and 68 thousand likes at the time of writing. Many people commented relating this to the old YouTube parodies of the Mario Kart games as well as praising the performances of Pascale and the rest of the cast from SNL.
With The Last of Us train already in motion, it is going full steam ahead to being one of HBO’s top series for the 2022-2023 season. Many future skits are theorized by fans to use plot points of the HBO hit, including a potential romantic plot point that the games highlighted in detail. You can watch SNL on NBC live at 11:30pm EST and on the streaming service Peacock.