A viral Instagram video has touched on a classic San Francisco theme, just in time for the holidays.
On a street near Union Square, the city’s shopping hub, Santa Claus is seen in hot pursuit of a Grinch-like character who is holding a bag of loot.
“Stop him! Stop him!” Santa yells, as the pair race past three San Francisco police officers standing near their patrol car.
Did Whoville’s infamous Christmas bandit really rob a store — and did Santa give chase while the officers calmlylooked on?
Well no.
The video — which has amassed over a quarter million views on Instagram since it was posted a week ago — was a skit produced by a San Francisco resident, Mario Riveira.
Riveira, whose handle @mario0o0o0o0o0o has over 32,000 followers on Instagram and over 159,000 followers on TikTok, posts man-on-the-street interviews with pedestrians as well as interviews with Bay Area rappers such as P-Lo and Nef the Pharaoh.
The Santa-Grinch video —in which Riveira plays the Grinch and his cousin plays Santa— was actually shot last year, but only went viral when he reposted it this year.
Recently, Riveira has released videos featuring himself as the Grinch running amok in the streets of San Francisco often targeting various Santa Clauses — either taking their hats or getting into shoving matches.
Speaking with The Chronicle on Tuesday night, he said his run along Powell Street past SFPD officers last year was spontaneous, and part of the continuous recording..
“Everything we do is in the moment, it’s never like ‘Oh, let’s plan to do this’,” he said. They saw the police officers hanging out in the area and decided to make the film.
San Francisco police did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it’s evident the officers understood it as a joke, as smiles are apparent even though the footage is shot from behind them.
In the aftermath of the video going viral, Riveira said some viewers wondered if the skit was real.
“There were people in the comments saying, like, ‘What if it’s real?,” he added, saying the timing when the video was filmed last year — not long after the Louis Vuitton store in Union Square was robbed as part of a wider incident that shook the city — contributed to the questions about authenticity. “We went up to the police afterwards and were talking to them. They caught on.”
Riveira — who grew up in Antioch and now lives in San Francisco with his wife and son —said his Bay Area skits were born out of downtime early in the pandemic and continued after he realized a video he had made quizzing pedestrians on Bay Area rapper Too $hort’s lyrics was taking off on TikTok.
He hopes to continue to cultivating his skills by creating street interview videos and hyper-localized Bay Area content.
“The Bay Area runs deep in my family’s bloodline,” he said.
Joel Umanzor is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: joel.umanzor@sfchronicle.com
