Former Nintendo PR Says Musk’s Wario Sketch Was Not Beloved

Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang say Nintendo disliked Elon Musk’s 2021 Saturday Night Live Wario sketch, and they were still on the company’s PR desk when it aired. Yang put it flatly: the bit did not go over well. Ellis laughed and called it not beloved.

They are not grading comedy. They are describing the two checks Nintendo of America used on pop-culture hits it did not pay for: is there a game on sale, and did the jokes stay inside a family brand.

Nintendo Graded the Sketch Like a Product Launch

Ellis was Nintendo of America’s director of social media marketing and original content. Yang was senior manager of creator relations and original content. Together they spent 27 years at the company, 13 for him and 14 for her, and they spent eight of those years as the faces of Nintendo Minute, the in-house YouTube show that ran from 2013 until December 17, 2021.

On October 9, 2026 they posted a 19-minute video walking through how the company actually feels when Saturday Night Live puts Mario, Zelda, or Wario on late-night television. The prompt was a new Weekend Update bit. The memory that spilled out was Musk in a yellow-and-purple fat suit on May 8, 2021.

Ellis’s first complaint was timing, not taste. “That one was out of left field,” he said. “There was no actual Nintendo product that connected to it.” Yang added that some of the material moved into subject matter that was uncomfortable for Nintendo. Those are the two tests. Laughs never made the list.

THE TWO CHECKS NINTENDO USED

• A product in market: A parody that lands while a related game is on shelves can be treated as free advertising. A parody with nothing to sell is just brand risk.
• A family-safe box: Mario, Peach, Luigi, and Link are sold to children. Drug, sex, and genital gags push past what the PR desk would sign off on.
• No paid deal: Ellis and Yang said Nintendo did not sponsor the new Zelda bit and did not plant the idea. The same was true of the Wario trial.

That is why two SNL Nintendo sketches can look similar from the couch and land very differently in Redmond. One has a SKU. The other has a banana peel and a murder charge.

What Musk’s Wario Trial Put on Air

Musk hosted the May 8, 2021 episode. In a courtroom sketch that ran just under six minutes, he played Wario, accused of killing Mario in a Mario Kart crash after a banana peel. Official SNL still posts the defense calls Wario courtroom clip from that night.

Kyle Mooney played Luigi. Kate McKinnon played Waluigi. Cecily Strong played the judge and banged a gavel on a Question Block. Musk’s then-partner Grimes came on as Princess Peach, delivering the line “I a-never touch him under the overalls” after the defense claimed Peach was sleeping with Luigi. Pete Davidson interrupted as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and recast the whole trial as an ad for an Italian-American anti-defamation group.

The adult turns were the problem inside Nintendo. The sketch joked about Mario using cocaine, put Luigi in bed with Peach, and cut to a pixelated shot of Luigi’s penis with a power-up sound. Yang’s “uncomfortable” line is the PR translation of that sequence. Nintendo sells those characters to kids. SNL put them in a sex-and-drugs courtroom.

They did not like the Elon Musk 2021 bit.

Krysta Yang, Kit & Krysta

Musk liked it. The morning after, he posted “Wario was my fav haha.” Critics called the sketch thin, a first idea that never found a second. That fight was public. The Nintendo one stayed in the building until Ellis and Yang left.

Link Versus Jason Reopened the File

The reason they are talking now is a Weekend Update segment from October 3, 2026, on an episode hosted by Dakota Johnson. Colin Jost brought out live-action versions of Link and Grand Theft Auto VI’s Jason Duval to argue over November. Mikey Day played Link in a tunic cut to match the Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Marcello Hernández played Jason with a toy rocket launcher.

The setup is a real calendar. The Ocarina of Time remake is due November 5, 2026. GTA 6 is due November 19, 14 days later. Other publishers have moved games off that window. Jost called the clash the Barbenheimer of video games. Jason sold “destruction, chaos and sex” and tagged Zelda as TMPNG, too many puzzles, no guns. Link answered with magic beans, a fairy in a bottle, and a last-second lie about full-frontal nudity.

The official SNL upload, Link and Jason arguing at Weekend Update, runs 5 minutes 51 seconds and had more than 2.2 million views within days. Day’s costume did more work than the script. The hat, the owl stitching, the leather strap, and the glowing fairy bottle looked built by someone who had the remake art open. Jason looked like a Halloween store run.

The live crowd cheered Zelda harder than a bit written to crown GTA. A running “Right Che?” gag treated Michael Che as the in-house Zelda nerd. The fairy bottle getting wrecked became the clip people kept. The sketch was written as if Vice City would own the room. Hyrule took it anyway.

The New Bit Had a Game to Sell

Ellis and Yang think this one would have gone over better in the building they used to sit in, even though it still teases Link as a nerd. Side-by-side billing with GTA 6 treated Ocarina of Time as a heavyweight. Puzzle jokes, they said, are a fair read of the series. Unpaid television that names a November 5 date is the kind of reach Nintendo always wanted from late-night, even if the live SNL audience is older than the kids who buy the games.

They still flagged gags that would have stung. Ellis thought the company might dislike the idea that Link is for nerds. Yang pointed to cracks about Zelda’s art style and the moment the bottled fairy falls apart and dies. Those are tone notes. They are not the empty-calendar problem that sank Wario.

TWO SNL NINTENDO NIGHTS

The product gap on the Wario night was not close. WarioWare Get It Together on Switch was announced at the June 15, 2021 Nintendo Direct, 38 days after Musk’s episode, and it shipped in the United States on September 10, 2021. The last numbered WarioWare before that was Gold on 3DS in 2018. On May 8 there was no box, no Direct, and no trailer to point a confused parent toward.

SNL Has Used Nintendo as the Square Foil Before

Saturday Night Live does not visit games often. When it does, Nintendo is usually the bright, childish object in the joke. Musk’s Wario trial used Mario as a murder victim. The Zelda bit uses puzzles as the uncool opposite of guns and sex. In between came a third version of the same gag.

THE NINTENDO NIGHTS ON SNL

1. May 8, 2021: Musk hosts and plays Wario on trial for Mario’s death. Nintendo’s PR desk, still including Ellis and Yang, calls it not beloved.
2. June 15, 2021: Nintendo announces WarioWare: Get It Together for Switch, the first new WarioWare since 2018.
3. February 4, 2023: Pedro Pascal hosts and stars in a fake HBO trailer that turns Mario Kart into a Last of Us prestige drama, complete with a shotgun loaded with red shells.
4. October 3, 2026: Weekend Update sits Link next to GTA 6’s Jason and lets the studio crowd pick a side.
5. October 9, 2026: Ellis and Yang, four years out of Nintendo, say the new sketch probably would have been fine, and the old one was not.

The Pascal trailer was the version fans actually liked. It made fun of prestige TV as much as it made fun of kart racing. Ellis called it rather funny. It still put Nintendo characters in an R-rated world. The difference is that it was clearly a parody of HBO, not a claim that Mario snorts cocaine.

Ellis also lowered expectations for SNL itself. He does not watch the show regularly and guessed that fewer than half of its sketches really land. The clips that matter, he said, are the ones that leave the broadcast and turn into memes. Nintendo has long chased that kind of mainstream bounce. The catch, in his telling, is that the live audience is older, and children should not be up that late anyway. The value is the clip, not the 11:30 p.m. slot.

Why These Two Can Say It Now

In 2021 they could not have given this interview. They were still the people who would have had to field the emails. Yang left Nintendo in January 2022 after more than 14 years, after Nintendo Minute’s last episode on December 17, 2021. Ellis’s last day was January 26, 2022, his 13-year anniversary. Nintendo of America’s San Francisco office, where the show was filmed, was closing. Both were offered a move to Redmond. Both said no.

They launched The Kit & Krysta Podcast in February 2022 and have spent the years since selling the thing Nintendo would never let them sell on the clock: what it felt like in the room. Their channel has about 114,000 subscribers. The October 9 video is a short, specific version of that pitch. How does Nintendo feel when SNL uses the toys. Are they mad, or do they like it.

The honest answer they gave is neither slogan. Nintendo likes a parody that names a street date and keeps Link’s tunic intact. Nintendo does not like a parody that puts Luigi’s penis on network television five weeks before anyone has a Wario game to ring up. Musk got a meme out of the yellow suit. The people who used to protect the brand got a story they could only tell after they quit.

Ocarina of Time still arrives November 5. GTA 6 still arrives November 19. Nintendo has not issued its own statement on either sketch. It rarely does. The people who used to draft those non-statements already said the quiet part, and they said it about the night Wario took the stand.