Saturday Night Live just spiced up its take on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with a bizarre skit featuring time travel and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It’s been a bizarre year overall, and Saturday Night Live has probably been one of the more bizarre productions as it made adjustments during a period of immediate social distancing restrictions. But now that production has resumed in front of a reduced live studio audience, the team behind Saturday Night Live can put even more strange energy into their sketches. Extra points for throwing a reference to the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise.
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The sketch sees Kyle Mooney playing a kid who spends all of his time inside and is growing up to be a jerk, and soon host Chris Rock appears as someone from the future who shows the kid what life is like in 2020. The hilarious through line between the two time periods, however, is that both eras have Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater recently launched a remake of the first two games, and that has been reflective on the year as a whole. The flash forward Kyle Mooney sees is himself in the pandemic era of 2020 (played by Beck Bennett) made unemployed and depressed as a result of COVID-19. But all Kyle Mooney pays attention to is the updated graphics of Tony Hawk.
It then gets wilder from there as Kyle Mooney is excited to see that his future father is Kenan Thompson (and not just a character played by the Saturday Night Live mainstay), and then it spins out even further by becoming an original series streaming on the Peacock streaming service.
It’s a joke with many layers, but one of them is that people are finding comfort in nostalgic properties and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is probably the biggest and most recent example of this. Good thing the remake turned out great, and ComicBook.com’s review of the release can be read here. Here’s an excerpt to get you started:
“A return to the welcoming arcade-like gameplay of the franchise while giving everything a fresh coat of paint for the new era. This could be the start of the grand, new wave for the Tony Hawk’s brand, and, even if it’s not, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 is the king’s return to the throne.”
What did you think of Saturday Night Live’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater take on the pandemic? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
