If you’ll cast your minds back five years to one of Saturday Night Live’s lowest points, the long-running live skit show featured Elon Musk as its host for an evening. While already off to a bad foot, there was a bizarre skit where Musk portrayed Wario in court defending himself in the murder trial of Mario. I don’t understand how any of that makes sense, but it was safe to assume Nintendo was not a fan of it. That’s exactly what former Nintendo employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang have said in a recent YouTube video.
A few weeks back, SNL featured another skit with Nintendo characters, that being Link, as he defends himself against Jason from Grand Theft Auto VI. It’s a pretty lousy skit, but it got Kit and Krysta talking about what Nintendo might think of the sketch. That cast their minds back to the aforementioned Musk skit, which both said Nintendo was not thrilled about.
As Krysta explains, “They [Nintendo] did not like the Elon Musk 2021, that… That did not go over well.” Kit elaborates further by saying, “That was out of left field. There was no actual Nintendo product that it was connected to. It was kind of out of left field, like, why is Elon Musk as Wario? Some of the stuff was getting into subject matter that was uncomfortable for Nintendo.”
The two speculate that Nintendo might be more favorable to the recent Zelda Vs. GTA skit, though I’m not so convinced. The entire premise of the joke is that GTA is more for grown-ups while Zelda is lame as hell, which isn’t pushed back on by Weekend Update host Colin Jost. It’s also weird as hell in 2026 to write a joke saying you don’t follow video games because you’ve had sex before, either.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
