Saturday Night Live Japan debuted last week, and to be quite frank, it’s almost creepy.

Readers of this blog know I’ve followed Saturday Night Live since its very first episode. Through the bad years and the good, I’ve been there, and I have no plans to ever tune out because it’s just a part of my life now.  However, what I didn’t know was that foreign versions have been launched in France and Spain.  This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and I only learned of those two because the news came out that Saturday Night Live Japan was going to air its first episode last weekend.

Considering the peculiar sense of humor of the Japanese, I wasn’t quite sure how the show would translate, but then I saw the opening credits.

They got Don Pardo, the voice of the American SNL since the first episode to do the cast read? Epic! Not to mention that the opening shots are filmed in the exact same style as the American credits, which is also fairly cool.  From what I heard about the rest of the episode, the humor was much more slapsticky than the American version, which holds more true with your usual Japanese style of comedy.  It could also somewhat harken back to the early days of our version, but my suspicion is that it is much about about what the Japanese are used to.

The biggest difference?  Their version will only air once a month.  Yikes.