What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Did Nintendo Buy the Rights to a Mario Porn Movie?

A recent post on Reddit’s r/interestingasfuck and a Snopes article have re-surfaced a long-standing internet rumor about a couple ancient porn movies inspired by Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. According to lore, Nintendo owns the distribution rights to two porn movies: Super Hornio Brothers and Super Hornio Brothers 2. The Big N bought the rights, it is said, to keep the movies from being distributed, and thus besmirching Nintendo’s good name.  

Despite widely held belief on the internet, there’s no hard proof that Nintendo had anything to do with the these movies, let alone owns them. The Super Hornio movies are unavailable for streaming or purchase, and it’s possible this is because Nintendo owns the rights and are keeping them from being seen, but there are other possibilities as well. 

The story of Super Hornio Brothers

Back in 2008, posters on the Something Awful forum started searching for evidence of a Super Mario porn parody, based on a few commenters’ murky memories of having seen it. There was so little information about the movie online, the initial speculation was that it was a hoax or a Mandela effect created by misremembering. But internet researchers are a tenacious horde, and by June 2009, they'd discovered there were actually two Super Hornio Brothers movies. Footage from VHS tapes was digitized and uploaded onto the internet.

Directed by Buck Adams and starring Ron Jeremy as Squeegie Hornio and TT Boy as his brother Ornio Hornio, Super Hornio Brothers told the story of a pair of plumbers who are transported into a computer—a sexy computer. You can watch all of the non-sex scenes on YouTube if you’re curious, and check out the cover art too.

This is the part where Nintendo supposedly gets involved

With the films located, the focus of the internet's investigation changed to "why were they so hard to find?"

Distributing older pornographic movies on the internet has been a thing basically since there was a commercial internet. Hundreds of films starring Ron Jeremy were (and still are) distributed by a company called Hot Movies. (Warning: These links are VERY not work safe.) On the Hot Movies site, 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 cannot 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 is because, “After Super Hornio Brothers was produced, the Nintendo corporation bought the rights to the films in order to halt their distribution indefinitely.”

This seems to be the source of the internet rumor, but a porn star who starred in hundreds of films recalling specific details about the distribution of a then 20-year-old video is not enough evidence to say anything for certain. No other source has backed up Jeremy’s assertion. Nintendo isn’t commenting, and enough time has passed that tracking down anyone who was involved with the business side of the movie seems unlikely. 

The legal trail of the Super Hornio movies

According to the U.S. Copyright Office database, the title "Super Hornio" for a VHS tape was registered in 1993 to “Midnight Video.” And that’s where the trail stops.

Nintendo is not listed as the copyright holder of Super Hornio, but that doesn’t disprove the rumor. “It’s possible that there was some assignment of either the copyright or trademark rights involved,” says Wesley Johnson, a Chicago-based copyright attorney. “You can change the registration information at the copyright office, but you don’t have to." (Full disclosure: Johnson is my brother, which is why he’s so patient with my ridiculous questions.)  

Why there may never be a porn with a name like "Super Hornio Brothers" again

Porn companies have a long history of releasing “parodies” of mainstream entertainment, and there’s a long history of lawsuits over it, because just calling your porn movie a "parody" doesn't provide automatic legal protection. Sadly, this eventually put a damper on giving porn movies funny names like Bonan the Barbarian and Super Hornio Brothers. “The industry was particularly leery of companies coming after the makers of porn parodies between 2006 and 2015. So porn producers responded by over emphasizing disclaimers and giving porn movies names like This Ain’t Roseanne XXX,” pornography journalist and director (NSFW LINK) Gram Ponante said. “My parody, made in 2009, was simple and elegant: Facts of Life: A Porn Parody; possibly the greatest film of all time.”

But even emblazoning your movie with a title like "this is porn, not (BIG ENTERTAINMENT PROPERTY)" doesn't guarantee a movie will be legally regarded as parody. It didn't work for the producers of Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation for instance. Whenever anyone releases a creative work inspired by existing intellectual property, they are taking the risk that someone will care enough to file a lawsuit and/or threaten one. And that risk might not have been worth taking for the producers of Super Hornio Brothers.

The power of a legal threat

“The word ‘Hornio’ does not appear in any published legal case in the United States,” Johnson said, “but that doesn’t mean there was no legal interaction between Nintendo and the producers. Nintendo could have threatened legal action if they didn’t pull it from circulation, and there wouldn’t be a public record.”

That hypothetical legal threat might have been enough to keep Hornio’s producers from releasing the movie by itself. Maybe the expense of a court case and a possible loss wasn’t worth it to Hornio’s producers. Porn is a volume business, so why take a risk when you can just release another movie?

What if Nintendo had nothing to do with it at all?

There's a very good chance that Nintendo wasn't involved in any legal imbroglio that might have prevented Super Hornio Brothers from being released. The porn was produced in 1993, the same year that Super Mario Bros., the movie, was released, and the parody is based on the movie more than the video games.

"I’ve never heard of a movie studio making a movie without exclusive rights to make the movie," Johnson says. So if any mainstream company either threatened the producers of Super Hornio Brothers or bought the rights to the movie, it could also have been Lightmotive, who bought temporary movie rights to Nintendo's characters (according to Wikipedia) instead of Nintendo. Or the studio that released Super Mario Bros. Or some other entity—rights ownership is complicated.

How to find out for sure whether Nintendo owns “Super Hornio” with this one cool trick

I don’t like ending things without a definite answer, so I’ll leave you with a call to action instead. I asked Wesley Johnson how I could get a final answer as to whether Nintendo owns the Super Hornio porn movies, and he said: “Obtain a copy of the full movie. Sell it on a website. Wait to see who sues you.”  

I'm obviously not going to do this—I've been told it could be costly and result in severe consequences—but if you want this mystery solved forever, that's my best advice.