Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once played Nintendo character Wario on Saturday Night Live, but it turns out this performance didn’t go over well with Nintendo internally. Former Nintendo marketing executives Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang recently revisited this incident on their co-hosted show, revealing the company didn’t react positively to the segment at the time.
When Musk hosted SNL in May 2021, he played Wario in a courtroom comedy sketch where the character was accused of killing Mario and had to defend himself in court. The premise of combining a classic Nintendo character with a murder case clearly didn’t land well with everyone.
Did the Content Make the Company Uncomfortable?
Both Ellis and Yang were still working at Nintendo at the time, so they personally experienced the reaction the performance generated. Yang said the company didn’t like the segment featuring Musk, and Ellis agreed it wasn’t popular at the time. He described the arrangement as quite unexpected, since the sketch had no actual promotional connection or product tie-ins with Nintendo. Ellis also noted some segments involved topics that made Nintendo uncomfortable. For a company that values character image and brand management, putting Wario in a courtroom drama involving murder, combined with Musk’s public persona, was definitely harder to manage than a simple game joke.
So Why Did the Zelda SNL Sketch Go Over Better?
Interestingly, the two former marketing executives also discussed SNL’s recent jokes about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Grand Theft Auto VI‘s release timing. Compared to Musk’s Wario segment, they thought this content was more likely to bring smiles to Nintendo executives’ faces, because the show not only mentioned Nintendo titles but could also generate extra exposure for the game, all without Nintendo spending a dime on promotion.
The difference between these two parodies might be that the former didn’t connect naturally enough with Nintendo products and touched on more sensitive topics, while the latter directly centered on the game itself. It seems for Nintendo, making jokes about their characters isn’t necessarily taboo, but how you do it, why you do it, and what it ultimately brings to the brand is what really matters.