5 Family-Friendly Companies With Surprising R-Rated Projects

5 The Boys Started At DC ... Until DC Saw Its Mega-Horny Version Of Batman

DC Comics has published some pretty edgy "mature readers only" comics over the years, like the one about killing God or the one where you got to see Batman's dingus (before DC cut it off, anyway). Still, it's hard to see them publishing a comic like The Boys, the basis for that show where Superman is a fascist psychopath, Aquaman is Harvey Weinstein with abs, and The Flash has a nasty habit of running through human flesh. Well, apparently DC felt the same way. The first six issues of the comic were published through DC's WildStorm imprint before they abruptly decided they wanted nothing to do with this shit.

So what made DC change their minds? Bear in mind that the first six issues included stuff like forced BJs and a hamster crawling out of a freshly murdered superhero's butt, and DC seemingly had no problem with that. Co-creator Garth Ennis claims that there wasn't any one thing that pissed off DC ... but it's pretty significant that issue 7 happened to be the one that introduced The Boys' version of Batman/Iron Man, a rich vigilante called Tek Knight who has a compulsive need to fornicate any hole he comes across, natural or man-made.

In his first issue alone, Tek Knight admits to having sex with his niece's chinchilla, the tail pipe of his "Tekmobile," and someone else's unattended cup of hot coffee. But the moment that probably made DC decide they weren't touching this thing with a ten foot bat-pole was when Tek Knight is seriously tempted by his teenage sidekick's butt. That important scene also made it to the cover of issue 8, one of the last to be officially announced by DC before they pulled the plug.

As Ennis put it: " you can have comics where people do awful things to each other, like Preacher, but you can't have a comic where super people do awful things to each other, like The Boys." To DC's credit, they made it easy for Ennis to take the series to another publisher, probably because they just wanted to get rid of this thing as fast as possible. Ennis admitted that the move ended up being good for the comic, since they were able to get away with stuff DC would have balked at, like massive superhero orgies or ... other stuff we can't mention because you'd get mad at us for spoiling the show.

4 Nintendo Made An Erotic Arcade Game, And Owns A Super Mario Porn Parody

You probably won't be too shocked to learn that there are pornographic versions of classic Nintendo games out there, because this is the internet: there are pornographic versions of everything. What you might not know is that one of those porno games was made by Nintendo themselves, back when they were younger and needed the money. 

In 1974, Nintendo wanted a way to get journalists to pay attention to one of their earliest arcade games, Wild Gunman. Reasoning that most journalists were probably male, and also horny maniacs, Nintendo employee Gunpei Yokoi (the future creator of the Game Boy) devised a Wild Gunman variant where, instead of shooting at cowboys, you shoot a Swedish woman's clothes off as she dances. Yokoi said he wanted to be there while the footage of the woman was recorded because she was "really beautiful," and Japan doesn't give much of a crap about workplace sexual harassment.

The game had a very limited release and Nintendo never intended it to be seen by general audiences. Oddly enough, something similar happened with the two other erotic properties Nintendo owns: Super Hornio Brothers and Super Hornio Brothers II, two XXX parodies created in 1993 to cash in on the equally offensive Super Mario Bros. live-action film. In them, Ron Jeremy plays a mega-hung version of Mario who must stop the evil King Pooper from traveling to the real world using a semen-powered machine. Honestly, it makes as much sense as the plot of the average Mario game.

Here are some YouTube highlights from the scenes that don't have genitals in them:

Why would Nintendo have anything to do with this? They didn't originally but, according to Mr. Jeremy himself, they bought the rights to the movies just to make sure no one ever saw them. Of course, Nintendo wasn't counting on these cinematic masterpieces leaking on the internet 16 years later and going viral. They might as well release them officially now, perhaps as an interactive game where you have to shoot at Ron Jeremy's overalls to get them to fall off? Ball's in your court, Nintendo.

3 The Muppets' "Mah Na Mah Na" Song Is From An Italian Softcore Movie

If you look up "Muppets song" on YouTube, as anyone with a soul does at least once a week, the first result won't be the show's actual opening theme but the "Mah Na Mah Na" song ... which has now started playing in your brain just from seeing those letters put together, so we might as well embed it here.

The song has appeared in pretty much every medium that Kermit and the gang have graced with their presence, from movies to soda ads, and it seems exactly like the sort of silly nonsense Muppets creator Jim Henson would come up with. But Henson didn't create the song -- he got it from an Italian sexploitation "documentary." Sweden: Heaven and Hell is a 1968 movie of the mondo film category, pseudo-documentaries which mostly served as excuses to film naked or semi-naked women doing vaguely titillating stuff. The song originally appeared in a scene about Swedish models chilling together in a sauna seemingly located in one of the sets from the movie The Thing:

Other parts of the movie deal with topics like prostitution, swingers, sex education, and suicide. You know, the sort of stuff people had to crank it to before PornHub existed. How the hell did that end up in The Muppets? Wikipedia claims that Sesame Street producer Joan Ganz Cooney heard it on the radio, but that statement is unsourced, so we're gonna go ahead and assume it was actually in a porno theater. Whatever the case, someone thought the song would be perfect for a children's show and Henson agreed, so they used it on a Sesame Street sketch first aired in 1969.

Henson liked that sketch so much that he added it to the Muppets' repertoire and, years later, included it in the first episode of The Muppet Show, which is where the song really entered the public consciousness. He also created a Muppet named "Mahna Mahna" (the hobo-looking one who sings the song). It's crazy to think that this character could have easily been named something like "Boom Chicka Wow Wow" or "Extended Moan" if that Sesame Street producer had watched a different porno that day.  

2 There's An R-Rated Web Cartoon Set In The Batman: The Animated Series Universe

Batman: The Animated Series broke new ground in the world of animation by being the first superhero cartoon that didn't assume its viewers were at crayon-eating age. Its creators understood that making "adult" animation isn't about adding gratuitous gore and dick jokes but about creating complex characters and emotional stories. The show spawned a whole universe of DC animated series that mostly stuck to the same tone and style ... except for the little known one that's full of gratuitous gore and dick jokes.

DC's Lobo web series looks like something a bored early 2000s teenager might have made, but it was an official Warner Bros. cartoon, hosted at warnerbros.com. In a single episode, Lobo murders an alien baby that pees acid on his face ...

Shoots various politicians' heads off ...

And delivers a speech full of (barely bleeped) F-words before finally dropping his pants and mooning the camera. This clip remains the only evidence that anyone in the DC Animated Universe has a butthole, or is aware of the concept of sex. (Starting at 1:40.)

Other episodes include Lobo entering a bet revolving around a space waitress' vagina, and a tasteful story about Lobo trying to break his favorite rock star out of space prison, only to find out that, get this, he's now homosexual (our protagonist ends up killing the gay guy, because see: late '90s/early '00s comedy).

Is this show really part of the DCAU, though? Well, Lobo's design isn't exactly the same as in his TV appearances but it's drawn in the same basic big-jaw style as the other shows, and there's a small reference to it in Gotham Girls, another web series with various DCAU ties. The DC Wiki considers it part of that universe, anyway, and who are we to question their supreme nerd wisdom?

1 Disney Owned A Small Part Of Two Canadian Porno Channels

We enjoy a good "Disney owns literally everything" joke as much as any other pawn of this capitalistic hellscape, but the truth is that Mr. Mouse is still somewhat selective about which companies he'll devour. Disney would never, for instance, directly buy a porno channel. Indirectly is another, sexier story, though.

See, Disney owns ABC (the network, not the letters ... yet), and ABC owns 80% of ESPN, and ESPN in turn owned 5% of a now defunct Canadian Pay Per View service called Viewers Choice. This means that, before Viewers Choice died along with the rest of the non-boxing-related PPV industry, Disney owned a tiny bit of their original channels ... including two called "Adam" and "Eden," which were devoted to gay and straight porn, respectively. (You'd be completely lost as to which is which if we didn't post that "respectively" there.)

Therefore, Disney was making at least SOME money from very un-Disney-esque films like Anal Trainer 2 or Hung Country for Young Men, or parodies of other Disney-owned properties like (Sex) Toy Stories and Desperate House MILFs -- all real titles from the Viewers Choice sub-websites for each channel. It's safe to say that money wasn't flowing in the opposite direction, though, since the Adam and Eden operation was so precarious that these websites weren't updated at all (other than the list of movies available) between 2004 and 2012. That, or the webmasters were constantly distracted by erotic misadventures for eight years straight. Or whatever orientation they might identify with.

Viewers Choice folded in 2014, but it's very possible that it would have gone down years earlier if it didn't have part of a massive corporation behind it. Meaning that if you lived in Canada and consumed PPV smut around that time, you probably owe at least some of your orgasms to Goofy and the gang. The next time you're at it, let out a hearty "gawrsh!" in their honor.

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.

Top Image: Amazon Studios