What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Did Nintendo Buy the Rights to a Mario Porn Movie?
A recent post on Reddit’s r/interestasfuck and a Snopes article have resurfaced a long-running internet rumor about a pair of ancient porn films inspired by Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. According to legend, Nintendo owns the rights to distribute two porn films: Super Hornio Brothers and Super Hornio Brothers 2. It is said that the Big N bought the rights to ban the distribution of the films and thereby tarnished Nintendo’s good name.
Despite widespread belief online , there is no conclusive evidence that Nintendo had anything to do with these films, let alone own them. Super Hornio movies are not available to stream or purchase, and this may be because Nintendo owns the rights and doesn’t allow them to be viewed, but there are other possibilities.
The story of the Super Hornio brothers
Back in 2008, posters on the Something Awful forum began looking for evidence of a Super Mario porn parody, based on several commenters’ vague memories of watching it. There was so little information about the film online that it was initially assumed that it was a hoax or a Mandela effect created by memory misrepresentation. But internet researchers are a persistent horde, and by June 2009, they discovered that there were actually two films about the Super Hornio brothers. Footage from the VHS tapes was digitized and posted on the Internet.
Directed by Buck Adams and starring Ron Jeremy as Squiggy Hornio and Titi Boy as his brother Ornio Hornio , Super Hornio Brothers tells the story of a pair of plumbers who are transported into a computer— a sexy computer. If you’re interested, you can watch all the non-sexual scenes on YouTube , and also check out the cover art .
This is the part where Nintendo is supposedly getting involved.
Once the films were discovered, the focus of online investigation shifted to the question: “Why are they so hard to find?”
The distribution of old pornographic films on the Internet has been around almost since the advent of the commercial Internet. Hundreds of films starring Ron Jeremy were (and still are) distributed by Hot Movies. ( Warning: These links are VERY unsafe. ) On Hot Movies, you can stream porn parodies of The Brady Bunch, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure , and The Graduate , as well as hundreds of other parodies and movies starring Ron Jeremy, but you can’t stream Super Hornio Brothers there or anywhere else. So what’s going on?
According to a statement posted on Jeremy’s website ( archived here ), this was because “following the production of Super Hornio Brothers, Nintendo purchased the rights to the films to halt their distribution indefinitely.”
This appears to be the source of the internet rumor, but a porn star who has appeared in hundreds of films recalling specific details of how a video was distributed from 20 years ago is not enough evidence to say anything for sure. No other source has confirmed Jeremy’s claim. Nintendo has not commented, and enough time has passed that tracking down anyone involved with the business side of the film seems unlikely.
Legal trail of Super Hornio films
According to the US Copyright Office database, the VHS tape title Super Hornio was registered in 1993 to Midnight Video. And here the trail stops.
Nintendo is not listed as the copyright holder for Super Hornio, but that doesn’t quell the rumors. “It’s entirely possible that there was some assignment of copyright or trademark rights,” says Wesley Johnson, a Chicago-based copyright attorney. “You can change your registration information at the copyright office, but it is not necessary.” (Full disclosure: Johnson is my brother, which is why he answers my ridiculous questions so patiently.)
Why porn with a name like “Super Hornio Brothers” may never appear again
Porn companies have a long history of producing “parodies” of popular entertainment, and there is a long history of lawsuits over this, because simply calling your porn film a “parody” does not provide automatic legal protection. Unfortunately, this eventually stopped porn films from being given funny names like Bonan the Barbarian and Super Hornio Brothers . “The industry was particularly wary of companies targeting porn parody creators between 2006 and 2015. So porn producers have responded by overemphasizing disclaimers and giving porn films titles like “This Isn’t Roseanne XXX ,” Porn Journalist and Director ( NSFW LINK ). – said Gram Ponante . “My parody, made in 2009, was simple and elegant: The Facts of Life: A Porn Parody; possibly the greatest film of all time.”
But even if you adorn your movie with a headline like “This is porn, not (GREAT ENTERTAINMENT PROPERTY),” that doesn’t guarantee that the movie will be legally considered a parody. For example, it didn’t work out for the producers of Fifty Shades of Grey: The XXX Adaptation . Whenever someone releases a creative work inspired by existing intellectual property, they run the risk that someone will want to sue and/or threaten them. And that risk may not have been worth the Super Hornio Brothers producers taking it.
The Power of a Legal Threat
“The word ‘Hornio’ does not appear in any published court case in the United States,” Johnson said, “but that does not mean there was no legal interaction between Nintendo and the manufacturers. “Nintendo could threaten legal action if they didn’t take it out of circulation, and then there wouldn’t be a public report.”
This hypothetical legal threat may have been enough to prevent Hornio’s producers from releasing the film themselves. Perhaps the costs of the trial and possible damages were not worth it to Hornio’s producers. Porn is a big business, so why take the risk when you can just release another movie?
What if Nintendo had nothing to do with this at all?
There’s a very good chance that Nintendo wasn’t involved in any legal confusion that might have prevented the release of Super Hornio Brothers . The porn was produced in 1993, the same year that the movie Super Mario Bros. was released, and the parody is based more on the film than the video games.
“I’ve never heard of a studio making a movie without exclusive rights to make it,” Johnson says. So, if any major company had either threatened the producers of Super Hornio Brothers , or bought the rights to the film, it could also have been Lightmotive that bought the temporary film rights to the Nintendo characters ( according to Wikipedia ) instead of Nintendo. Or the studio that released Super Mario Bros. Or some other object – ownership of rights is complex.
How to Find Out For Sure If Nintendo Owns “Super Hornio” With This Cool Trick
I don’t like to end things without a definitive answer, so instead I’ll leave you with a call to action. I asked Wesley Johnson how I could get a definitive answer on whether Nintendo owned the Super Hornio porn movies, and he replied, “Get a copy of the full movie. Sell it on the website. Wait to see who sues you.”
I’m obviously not going to do this – I’ve been told it could be costly and have serious consequences – but if you want this mystery solved forever, this is my best advice.