And like most fodder, Psy-Cloned came from humble beginnings.
“I don’t understand the concept.”īut understanding the mysterious ways of the web has never stopped something from going inexplicably viral before. “I had to have a friend of mine explain to me what viral meant,” he said.
A self-described “total Luddite,” the 50-year-old Naylor said over the phone that he was a bit bewildered by my attempts to track him down. Pornhub comments on the “SPIDER SEX” clip.Īs Psy-Cloned went viral, its originator continued his life totally unaware. There are other versions of the Spider-Man spandex porn out there, somewhere. Yet the RedTube clip - the earliest I could find - is about four minutes shorter than the PornHub version. On March 2012, more than five years ago, “Spiderman and his tattooed clone” was uploaded. The rabbit hole goes deeper, as the PornHub clip itself carries a watermark for RedTube, another streaming-porn service. The comments on “SPIDER SEX” (link NSFW, obviously) and its 715,000-plus views reflect the clip’s viral past. That mystery didn’t last long, however, as users on Tumblr traced the Peter-on-Parker action to a clip from PornHub uploaded four years ago. Its humor was easy to understand, it was just the slightest bit inappropriate, and the trend’s unclear origins added a light mystery to the proceedings. The Spider-Man Ass Slap soon became a quintessential video meme on Vine and YouTube. It’s a simple, unexpected video punch line that has, nearly two years later, racked up more than 58 million loops. The next month, on September 12, 2015, a Vine user known as “9/11 Did Bush” uploaded a version of the GameCube start-up jingle, with the percussive two-handed spank in place of the final note.
That’s the earliest instance of the meme I could find - the series of events leading up to the slaps’ emergence online in the middle of 2015 is not clear. (JoeyD’s Vine account has since been deleted, so I’m working with an incomplete snapshot provided by the Internet Archive.) A month before JoeyD’s Vine, a YouTube user had edited the Spider-Man slaps into a music clip from the Japanese band Weaver. By October 30 of that year, “The iconic spiderman ass slap” had nearly 48,000 loops. On August 8, 2015, a Vine user by the name of JoeyD uploaded offscreen smartphone footage of the two Spider-Men groping each other, filmed as someone giggles in the background. A quick Google search produces the shoddy box art (link NSFW) that boasts, “The evil villain has a new plan to clone his very own sexual superhero!” and confirms the ass slap’s provenance.Īccording to Know Your Meme, the Spider-Man Ass Slap, as it’s now known, came to life in the summer of 2015. While the Spider-Man clips are not labeled, a related clip on PornHub called “Psy Cloned - Scene 1” and its thumbnail are obvious giveaways that it was produced on the same set. The Spider-Man clip comes from an adult film known as Psy-Cloned, made by Naylor and starring two performers that he recalled as Ray Boy and Ace. “I created, shot, directed, edited all 65 of our productions,” he proudly boasted in his first email. The relative popularity of the search term “spiderman ass slap” on Google over the past two years.Īrmed with an old email address I’d found on a janky GeoCities-esque page on the Internet Archive, I’d been trying to get in touch with someone from Pig Daddy Productions, a now-defunct adult-film company at which Naylor was a main creative force. The pair of web-wonder asses could come from anywhere, synced to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” or the final sounds of the GameCube start-up chime. It was the sort of video that might get you into mild trouble at work it would certainly raise the eyebrows of anyone in view of your computer screen. On Vine, when you least expected it, it would happen: A clip of two men in tight-fitting Spider-Man costumes would appear, slapping each other on the ass and - if you paid close enough attention to the clips - emitting grunts and moans. In the fall of 2015, Spider-Man’s ass was everywhere.
The Spider-Man ass-slap video is arguably the most popular Spider-Man movie in the country, besides the other one. To answer Naylor’s question: It’s a bunch of people. Naylor is the director of the gay superhero-themed 2008 porn film Psy-Cloned, and the “it” in Naylor’s question is viral remixes of the film’s most famous scene, in which two Spider-Men slap each other on the ass for six minutes. “Is it just one person or a bunch of people doing it?” That’s one of the various questions Joe Naylor had for me when I called him up this week.