Mario Gets a Sedan

Japanese car commercials hit different—they’ve got this fearlessness about doing something genuinely weird that no Western brand would touch. Mercedes-Benz figured this out and made a Super Mario ad for the GLA, which is genuinely one of the most absurd marketing moves I’ve ever seen, in the best possible way.

The setup is perfect: Mario tearing through Mushroom Kingdom in a sedan. Not a kart, not some concept car—a real luxury vehicle cutting through those bright, hyperreal mushroom landscapes where he normally just jumps on Goombas. It shouldn’t work but it does. Mario’s all velocity and precision, and suddenly he’s got an engine instead of his legs. The commercial gets that perfect logic where the car ad serves the Mario universe, not the other way around.

And of course there’s a twist—an old enemy derails the whole ride. It has to end in chaos. That’s Mario in a nutshell: you know exactly what’s coming, and it happens anyway.

This is exactly the kind of thing that lives in Japan for six months and never escapes the rest of the world, which feels right. Some ideas don’t need to travel.