Porn Parodies: A Recent History (Part 2 of 3)

The legal issues, for one thing, are far more clear-cut. Thanks to Larry Flynt’s own landmark Supreme Court case against Jerry Falwell, well-publicized and romanticized in The People vs. Larry Flynt, parody was legally guaranteed protection under the First Amendment. If you were a public figure or celebrity, you were fair game to be copied, no matter how unflattering the terms. This meant that lawsuits for defamation and loss of revenue, etc. are much harder to prosecute now – Tiger Woods will just have to deal with “Tiger Woods" banging a golf groupie on the ninth hole, for instance, as part of the price of his fame and glory.

The other issue is the sheer mass of porn out in the pornosphere. Again, thanks to the internet, there is a daily flood of amateur sex tapes, pro and semi-pro performers, and hundreds if not thousands of independent entrepreneurs who have inundated the market with product. Just looking at the DVD market, last year there were around 19,000 videos released. That’s about 50 a day. Making any flick stand out enough to capture a big enough audience to bring the big profits everyone seeks is difficult. So the industry is returning, once again, to parody to try to catch some attention. Luckily, the American porn consumer seems to like what they see.

The big difference between the porn parodies of 2010 and their predecessors is the attention to detail the producers are lavishing on the productions. Since the internet makes everyone an honorary nerd, half-assed productions that didn’t do justice to the original shows they were parodying won’t cut it for the fans. You can’t just throw a blonde, a brunette, and a straight-guy-pretending-to-be-gay in any old apartment set and expect Three’s Company to emerge. With that in mind, porn parodies today take great pains to not only ensure smokin’-hot sex, but also to casting reasonable doubles for original cast members, into building similar, if not identical, sets to the originals, and including elements in their storylines that borrowed heavily from what made the original show popular.

Take This Ain’t Star Trek XXX, for example. When director Axel Braun wanted to make the flick for Hustler, he knew he couldn’t half-ass it – Trekkies would revolt (or worse, not buy it) if it wasn’t a reasonable facsimile of the show. And as one of the most widely (and poorly) parodied TV shows of all time, fans were used to seeing their hallowed show brutalized not by raw sex, but by inaccurate translation to the screen. So Braun wisely paid meticulous attention to the construction of the bridge set and the casting of the show. He even convinced star Evan Stone to cut his signature long flowing hair for the part. He made certain that there was a reasonable stab at the plot, encouraged Stone to over-act ala Shatner, and included enough in-jokes to please the rabid fans. (It didn’t hurt that he also cast superstar Jenna Haze in the role of a hot alien chick, Jada Fire as Uhura [who else?] and Aurora Snow as a comely yeoman. YUM!)

The result? A credible homage to the show, strong sales, and a hit sequel.

The This Ain’t Married With Children XXX parody was another strong hit. Featuring new “it girl” and contract star Kagney Linn Karter, it delightfully re-created the stereotypical set that we all grew to love in the 90s. The first installment was so popular that it got the actor who played Bud Bundy in the original, David Faustino, to take a secret tour of the set during the filming of the sequel (considering his character’s propensity for our industry, it’s too bad he didn’t stick around and do a little commentary for the behind-the-scenes, but . . . ).

There are . . . less well-done parodies, as well. The less said about them, the better. That being said, there are some dreadfully-painful-but-still-hot-and-entertaining parodies out there . . . Star Wars fans were shocked by the treatment Private gave to their award-winning Porn Wars trilogy, including as it did heavily-accented Euros, dogfights between rip-offs of Virgin Galactic’s Space Ship One, and clumsy lightsaber battles. But they still bought it, out of morbid curiosity, and they weren’t disappointed by the sex. It helped that it was parodying the less-popular prequel trilogy, rather than the venerable classic -- but the original Star Wars hasn't been spared the porn treatment one bit. And that’s the great thing about parody – even when it’s dreadfully bad, it can still be good.


NEXT: Part 3: Why is parody so damn popular right now?

Porn Parodies: A Recent History (Part 1 of 3)

The explosive popularity of porn parodies in the last two years has been staggering, and several folks have asked me to address this since I'm the Big Time Porn Guy And All Around Sex Nerd. Are they worth watching? Are they any good? I've had dozens of inquiries about them, and so I decided to look at the porn parody phenomenon in detail.

After enduring an artistic (and commercial) bout of ennui, the industry hit upon its “next big thing” after the release of Hustler’s Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, perhaps the most influential porn video of 2008-9. While the actual trend towards parody had begun a year or so before, arguably with That 70's Ho or This Ain't The Munsters, the fact is that Hustler’s Larry Flynt, the Godfather of the porn industry, mixed traditional parody with political satire when he found a perfect porn double of Sarah Palin, the deliciously MILFy brunette Lisa Ann, and rushed a well-done flick to market mere weeks before the election. Buoyed by nation’s partisan feelings at the time, the genuine lust for the intrepid GOP VP Candidate in the souls of American men of both parties, and an uncanny instinct for innovation, Hustler nailed it with Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? While actual sales figures are unknown, I have it from a reliable industry source that they’re at least in the six digit range – and not the low end.

There’s nothing new about porn parody. It’s a perennial favorite, a well of creativity to which the industry has returned again and again. Its popularity has always been the same: to see popular and familiar entertainment augmented by sex. Often (inadvertently) funny, sometimes erotic, the degree to which porn parodies have been commercial successes has often depended as much on the public mood of the time as upon the length and degree to which the producers and directors are willing to go to adhere to the show or movie which inspired it. Fear of legal action by the original show’s cast and producers, the expense of essentially re-creating the elements of a show, and (quite frankly) the limited pool of talent upon which the industry had to choose from made parody a hit-or-miss thing, at best.

There have been really bad porn parodies (Spermbusters, a weekend wonder homage to the Bill Murray flick, remains a stain on my brain) but also some really notable porn parodies in the past – a personal fave is the 1976 ode to Charlie’s Angels, A Coming of Angels. Apparently aping a T&A drama wasn’t too much of a stretch for the industry at the time. But that factors into the equation, as well. With the explosion of VHS in the 1980s into the mainstream market, and the reduction of the cost-of-entry due to the switch from film to far-cheaper video tape, coupled with the loosening of obscenity standards due to landmark legal cases, made low-budget “gonzo” style sex shoots much more profitable than expensive parodies, and new companies specializing in the quick-and-dirty business of four hour stroke-a-thons began leaving the more-traditional porn houses in the dust. Today there are only a handful of companies that even attempt to wrap any kind of story around their porn, and even those are often considered “loss leaders”.

Then came the Internets. Just when the industry was beginning to artistically stabilize in the early 1990s as the insanely profitable DVD market was peaking and attention started to turn once again to parody, the explosive popularity of the internet and the illicit pleasures available therein provided a whole new type of competition, even as it provided a vast new market. Only now, when the novelty of the internet has begun to fade, have the big production houses tried their hand at parody again – only this time, it’s different.

(Continued In Part 2)

Sex Addiction: Yes, Folks, It's Crap

Just a quick note about an outstanding article on the subject. Of course, keep in mind it's alter.net. Follow the link for more . . .

Sex addiction is the latest star in America’s sexual burlesque. Sex addiction has of course been a malaprop from its first usage. Addiction was originally and properly defined as a physiological dependence on a substance to which the body had grown accustomed, such as alcohol, nicotine, heroin and various other drugs. The cure was to end the dependency and abstain from further use of the substance in order to avoid a recurrence of the physiological dependency. These treatments do work and many people have been cured of their addictions and never returned to the addictive substance.

Applying such a metaphor to sexual pleasure creates a misleading and ominous innuendo. Sex is not an addictive substance. It’s a human interaction on which the survival of the species is dependent. It is also possibly the most pleasurable and sought after activity known to humankind, and arguably an experience no one should be deprived of.

Blatant Author's Plug: Erotic Steampunk Novel

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For the collector: Alan Moore's Lost Girls

There’s porn and then there’s erotica, and which is which is definitely tied more to who you are and what you like than any objective standard. Some say it’s only porn if you have your dick in your hand – but that covers a lot of territory, especially for some people. Erotica can be hung in a museum and paid a lot of money for, or bound in leather and paid a lot of money for, or released in an exclusive collector’s edition DVD box set and paid a lot of money for, whereas porn is cheap, if not free, these days.

But there are places where the two overlap – where the possession of a piece of porn is artful enough by design to be erotica. One such case is the divinely illustrated Lost Girls trilogy, in which comic book icon Alan Moore (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta, The Watchmen, From Hell, Swamp Thing, et. Al.) scripts a delightfully dirty examination of the sexuality of three fairy-tale heroines (Wendy, from Peter Pan, Dorothy, from the Oz books, and Alice from Alice in Wonderland) at different phases of their life, all meeting by happenstance at an Austrian hotel on the eve of WWI.

I couldn’t do it justice to describe the tale in detail – the art is a gorgeously rendered, simply drawn sensual explosion like an erotic opium dream by Melinda Gibbie, and Alan Moore’s language makes love to your brain – but it warrants a firm “Check It Out!” as one of the erotic artistic high points of this brave new century. It also warrants a warning for the sexually conservative: the tale isn’t completely “sex positive”, it’s unabashedly dirty. There are strong and suggestive themes of coercive sex and sex with children, but considering the context and the masterful presentation such issues are expository, not exploitive. There is a heavy element of fantasy, here, both sexual and mythic; those who believe that sexual impulses spring full-formed from your groin when you turn 18 and not before will be disappointed.

Whack to it or put it on your coffee table, this is a must-have piece of erotic literature for the serious collector.

Apple Removes Sexy Apps From iTunes Store – “i” Apparently Stands For "Idiot"

Once again, Apple shoots itself in the foot in the latest round of porntech shenanigans, as it removes around 5,000 sex-related apps from it’s iTunes site. The reason? According to the one comment the executive class at Apple has issued,

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.” (Apple Exec Phil Schiller)

Okay, some women complained. Some kids may have seen some boobs on a tiny screen. But instead of finding a nifty filter work-around that can safely sanitize your iPhone from the effects of boobs by not displaying such risque content, the “Apple Geniuses” decided to just yank 5,000 apps that were, theoretically, making them money. Not to mention killing the hard work of the developers who put those apps together, on top of the additional insult that "some" apps, including Playboy, Hustler, and SI's storied Swimsuit Edition are somehow less-sexual and more acceptable than the others.

Are these guys idiots, or what?

Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that a few complaints from a few concerned women and parents pale in comparison to the thousands of men and women who routinely purchase sexy apps from iTunes, generating a profit. Forget, if you will, the fact that such adult content is legal, private, and doesn’t get inflicted on others, due to the nature of the media. Pretend the fact that thousands of men – big, manly, disposable-income-enough-to-afford-expensive-toys-like-the-iPhone MEN have been voting for such content with their credit cards in the perfectly legitimate and legal pursuit of happiness via boobs that they, in America, have a Goddess-given right to.

If Apple isn’t smart enough to figure out that in technology terms, success follows porn, then they deserve to lose the revenue that they will over this mother-of-all-bonehead-moves. Consider: in the 1980s Sony wouldn’t lisence it’s Betamax technology to porn companies, due to the prurient nature of the content and their desire to be seen as “family friendly”. VHS was an inferior format, but people aren’t going to buy one VCR to watch porn upon and another to view Back To The Future – so Betamax got pwnd. This was just the first in a long list of technological innovations that were decided by the porn industry. America Online tried to kill all adult content a couple of times around. What ever happened to them? Blockbuster decided to “edit for content” objectionable scenes out of movies, in order to keep from offending a tiny minority who found T&A abhorrant and not “family friendly”. The internet, itself, grew to its present titanic proportions because people were willing to pay for higher bandwidth and faster machines to (in part) watch porn better.

The lesson here? People (men especially) like porn. They love porn. They will pay for porn, and they won’t buy into technological devices or paradigms that decrease their porn-watching opportunities. They have a right to it, they enjoy it, and as long as kids don’t have easy access to it, they are doing nothing wrong. Men tend to be better early-adopters than women when it comes to cool tech, and they tend to have more disposable income. And there are plenty of women who indulge in the occasional sexy app, too – not everyone with a vagina automatically conflates the downfall of Western Civilization to the chance exposure of a nipple or an upskirt shot. Some of those ladies like to eye a little action, themselves, so I’m told.

This move gets double the bonehead points for timing, too. Right now the mobile communication paradigm is being pulled in two directions (remember Betamax v. VHS here): the Apple-driven model of pay-for-play apps at the iTunes store vs. the Google-backed philosophy of allowing 3G web content to flow freely from the Internets to the phone/data appliance. Apple wants to be your merchant – but they also, apparently, want to be your censor as well. Right now the two methods are neck-and-neck, but this serious gaffe by Apple might be the first in a series of coffin nails for their paradigm, as a new generation of smartphones (see: Driod) appear just as the iPhone contracts are expiring and early-adopters are once-more looking for the Next Cool Toy.

Remember all of those things I told you to forget? Remember them, now. Perfectly legal adult content is enjoyed by husbands and fathers (and wives and mothers) all over this country every day. The idea that what has become socially acceptable to a majority of Americans is somehow unsavory and evil – evil enough to drive the sexy apps out of iTune land like St. Patrick banishing the mythological serpents from Ireland – is backwards. MOST Americans enjoy some sort of sexually suggestive or explicit entertainment every week, if not every day. Apple’s attempt to demonize and condemn their behavior by this extreme and sudden act is so out of touch with its hip, not-a-PC image that the consequences of irritating the testosterone-poisoned crowd will be fierce. Most won’t complain. Most won’t even rant. They’ll vote with their credit-cards again, and Google and Verizon will have won an important – if not crucal – round in this game.

Idiots.

Eating Out on Valentine's Day in Toronto

I saw this and loved it! Kinda makes me wished I lived in Toronto. ALmost. The short version is that this restaurant, Mildred's Temple Kitchen, isn't just having a Valentine's Day special this weekend, they're also encouraging their customers to get it on in the bathrooms.

This is an innovative twist on the culinary experience, but having done the deed in a restaurant bathroom before -- with memorable results -- I can't help but feel that this would be a definite draw for the place. Indeed, why not have a dedicated "privacy stall" in an up-scale restaurant for that sort of thing? I'm hoping the idea catches on. One grows tired of just the bedroom, kitchen, car, and the dumpster behind that abandoned grocery store. Allowing their customers to eat out after they've eaten out is a guaranteed way of packing them in -- exhibitionists and "danger lovers" all over Canada are sure to make a pilgrimage.

And just think of the possibilities on "singles night" -- !

IA