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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about movies and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the movie urban legends featured so far.

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Nintendo owns the rights to Super Hornio Brothers, a porn parody of Super Mario Brothers.

A curious sort of boom market has developed in recent years for high end porn parodies of popular films and TV series, especially superhero films and shows, like Batman XXX: A Porn Parody (CBR spoke to the director of the film at the time and it is fascinating how much care is put into the production of these films. As CSBG’s Sonia Harris noted a while back, the costume for the porn parody of Wonder Woman looks better and more like the actual comic book character than the costume for the David E. Kelley Wonder Woman TV pilot!). While these porn parodies have become big business these days (you almost see as many mentions of porn parodies as you see car insurance ads these days), the idea of doing a porn parody of popular culture has been around for decades. You would be hard pressed to pick a notable television series or film that has not had a porn parody at one point or another over the years (I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed on a Superman porn parody that DC sued over thirty years ago). However, very rarely do you ever see the inspiration for the porn parody ever get involved in the parody and yet that is exactly what happened with Nintendo and the 1993 film Super Hornio Brothers.

In 1993, porn actor and director Buck Adams decided to do a porn parody of the video game Super Mario Brothers, which was being adapted into a major motion picture that year starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as heroic plumber brothers Mario and Luigi, Dennis Hopper as the evil King Koopa and Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy. Adams found some difficulty getting funding for his elaborately planned production (three days of filming! That would be the porn equivalent of about nine months of filming for a regular movie). His original backer, Sin City Entertainment, dropped out over the production costs and Adams was able to sign with Midnight Video by agreeing to reduce his filming schedule to just two days. The resulting film, though, was still too long to release on its own, so it was split into two films, Super Hornio Brothers and Super Hornio Brothers 2. The films star Ron Jeremy and TT Boy as brothers Squeegie Hornio and Ornio Hornio. They are computer programmers who get sucked into their unfinished video game and must save Princess Perlina (played by Chelsea Lynx) from the evil King Pooper (played by Adams himself, using a weird voice). Beyond the slightly more involved production, the film is not exactly memorable. It’s just a typical porn parody of the day. Some silly attempts at plot, some costumes and then a lot of sex. What sets this film apart, however, is what happened after it was released.

Nintendo, you see, is very protective of its intellectual property.

After the actual Super Mario Brothers film turned out to be a critical and commercial flop (not even making back half of its budget at the box office), Nintendo has been extremely cautious with licensing characters for future films, presumably fearing any negative backlash (although they did allow Bowser from Super Mario Brothers to make a cameo in Wreck-It Ralph). So naturally enough, they were not fans of there being a major porn parody of Super Mario Brothers, so they actually purchased the rights to the two films with the specific intent of burying the films, which is exactly what happened.

This strange occurrence was discovered by Zack Parsons of Something Awful back in 2008 when he set out to confirm the existence of the two films, which was surprisingly difficult to do. Eventually he managed to get a hold of a copy of the second film (which contains a recap of the first film) to review in his Horrors of Pornography column. Parsons’ search for the film shed new light on this “lost” film, including the revelation of Nintendo’s purchase of their rights (confirmed on the website of the film’s star, Ron Jeremy, explaining why the film cannot be re-offered now). I guess you can’t blame Nintendo for trying to essentially buy some insurance to cover their property.

The legend is…

STATUS: True

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.