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John Mulaney's "Beppo" SNL Sketch Made Us Fall in Love with a Monkey Puppet
The surprisingly emotional pretape was written by Dan Bulla, Steven Castillo, Jake Nordwind, and Mike DiCenzo.
Saturday Night Live went chimp crazy this past weekend, and centered a surprisingly emotional story around an adorable monkey puppet.
John Mulaney returned to host SNL for a sixth time on November 2, and his installment introduced viewers to Beppo, a space explorer chimp who was the star of a hilarious parody of space mission movies.
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The pretaped sketch is set in NASA Mission Control in November 1962, with Mulaney as Jim, a technician who is trying to get Beppo the monkey astronaut (voiced by cast member James Austin Johnson) home after completing the first orbit around Earth. But Beppo's ship has a malfunction, and the mission control team can no longer bring him home.
As Jim is about to destruct Beppo's ship to make his death quick and painless, Ego Nwodim — playing a Hidden Figures-inspired character — enters the room. After "some calculations with paper and pencil," Nwodim's mathematician believes the team can still get Beppo back to Earth.
Beppo hits the wrong button and his ship explodes — but the chimp actually uses the explosion to blast his lander module to Earth. Crash landing just outside of the NASA offices, Beppo makes his triumphant return, striding in, dressed in his astronaut suit, as he greeted by boisterous applause from the mission control team.
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SNL "Beppo" writers shared footage of the puppet in motion
"Beppo" was directed by Mike Diva, and written by Dan Bulla, Steven Castillo, Jake Nordwind, and Mike DiCenzo.
The sketch used an actual puppet for Beppo, which you can see taking it's first steps (courtesy of puppeteers Monkey Boys Productions) in a video Castillo posted to his Instagram. You can watch that here.
"Monkey Boys Productions built Beppo in a day and puppeted everything on set," writer and sketch producer Bulla wrote in a November 3 story on his Instagram. Per his story, the visuals were inspired by the first Alien film from 1979 and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
"Beppo" was also the latest pretaped sketch to be under the "Midnight Matinee" banner, which viewers previously saw in the intro for the murderous musical "My Best Friend's House" starring Ariana Grande.
As the SNL X account posted online: "Beppo isn't just a monkey, he’s an American hero." Watch his heroic adventure in the video above.
