Japan might just have stolen the show at the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Sunday night, after its prime minister Shinzo Abe made a surprise appearance during the handover—dressed as Mario.

It's traditional, at the end of each Olympics, for the departing host nation to give space for the next city to strut its stuff, and with Tokyo to host in 2020, people might have expected a spectacle, but not this.

Abe, the country's buttoned-down and conservative leader, made his cameo in the Rio arena, appearing from one of the Mario games' iconic green warp pipes, dressed in the blue overalls and red shirt and cap (though these quickly fell away to reveal a suit, presumably to maintain some shred of dignity for the leader of the country with the third-largest GDP in the world).

His surprise appearance came at the end of a two-minute video, which showed athletes competing in and around Tokyo landmarks, helped by a few of the country's other famous pop-culture exports, including Pac-Man and Doraemon.

Super Mario Brothers was first developed by a group of Japanese game designers in the 1980s who are now internationally famous for inventing a character who might just be Japan's most famous export of all: Shigeru Miyamoto, Koji Kondo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and Takashi Tezuka. More than 310 million copies of dozens of Mario games have been sold worldwide, published by Nintendo.

It certainly beats Boris Johnson goofily waving a flag in front of a London bus, which is the best our politicians could muster in 2008, when Beijing handed over to London ahead of the 2012 Games.