Video: Real life Mario Kart hits the streets of Tokyo

October 19, 2011 Omar Rana Funny

Japan’s Cliccar car blog seems to have a sense of humor, albeit a slightly more restrained one than that of French prankster Remi Galliard’s real life Mario Kart role play in 2008. Two Cliccar writers popped out of the office one day dressed as Nintendo’s Mario and Luigi, driving X-Carts, essentially street-legal go-carts through Tokyo. The cars themselves come as standard with a 35 mph top speed and weigh only 209 lbs, though tuned examples can push 50 mph.

The story perhaps is that of exposure and marketing, as I am writing this article, the video already has nearly 850,000 views on YouTube; a far cry from Galliard’s 43,000,000 on his first video (11,000,000 on the second), but certainly not too shabby either.

Without heavily critiquing what seems to be a very effective publicity stunt, the Cliccar folks seem much less in character and it seems they aren’t having nearly as much fun as they could be. Certainly there are quite a few shots of them waving and posing for mobile phone cameras, but there are no banana peels thrown, no run-ins with the fuzz and no grocery store/shopping mall sequences. Either way you look at it, this was a pretty clever stunt to pull.