It’s a joke that just about writes itself. In The Last of Us, a mustached working-class fellow must protect a “princess” through a landscape infested with sentient mushrooms, sometimes scaling tall structures and catwalks to avoid lethal plants and monsters. It’s almost like a gritty Mario reboot, and on Saturday Night Live last night, host Pedro Pascal made the connection explicit. Playing an ultra-serious version of Nintendo’s famous plumber, he and SNL showed us all what a prestige-TV HBO adaptation of Mario Kart might look like.
The show clearly spent a lot of money on this, creating post-apocalyptic vistas akin to The Last of Us, but with Mario flourishes. Ironically, it was a similarly dark vibe that sank the original live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, but last night’s mash-up spoof has some online calling for Pascal to voice Mario now rather than Chris Pratt. He certainly seems to have cornered the market on wasteland-roaming sci-fi dad figures.
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Check out the Mario Kart sketch below:
Is it blasphemous to say he rocks those overalls better than Bob Hoskins? Viewers of The Last of Us will appreciate specific scene recreations, like the museum clicker encounter with a Goomba instead.
What do you think of Pedro Pascal as Mario? Let us know in comments.
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