There was a time on the Internet when adult video clips of popular cartoon characters were all the rage. So upon discovering the news that Disney owns the domain MuppetFucker.net it would be logical to assume that Disney had once purchased that domain to stop the porn industry from perverting their characters. Only that’s not at all why Disney came to own the MuppetFucker domain, and the story of how they came to own that URL is pretty fucking amazing.
This whole story started when YouTuber Joshua Gillespie, a Muppet researcher (that’s a thing), uncovered that Disney owns the domain and sent out this tweet:
If you need a laugh today, just remember; Disney bought the domain name Muppet Fucker pic.twitter.com/hj22Fs6oFP
— Joshua Gillespie (@HalfHearted_JG) November 11, 2016
From there, he did some detective work and tracked down the lineage of the MuppetFucker domain and that’s where the story really took a turn for the strange. You see, MuppetFucker.net was actually previously owned by the Jim Henson Company and they required it along with other assets when they purchased the company back in 2004. Going back to my original point about cartoon porn, it wasn’t the Jim Henson Company’s intention to stop Muppet porn from hitting the web at all, the story gets even weirder….
via Beth Elderkin at io9:
Austin resident Noah Lee started going by the DJ name Muppetfucker in 1995, after he and a friend of his came up with it and thought it was funny. He used the name for six years, and owned several MuppetFucker domain names, including MuppetFucker.net. Lee told io9 the Jim Henson Company likely found out about Muppetfucker after he performed at SXSW in March 2001 and got a review in a local weekly magazine. A few days after the review came out, Lee got a cease-and-desist letter from the Jim Henson Company, which demanded he stop using the name Muppetfucker and hand over all domain rights.
“The day the letter showed up, I walked to my mailbox and opened it up, and when I pulled out that Kermit letterhead I knew right then it was over,” Lee told io9. “Many people said I should try and fight it or that I could pick something similar like ‘Puppetfucker,’ but let’s face it, nothing is funnier than Muppetfucker, as this latest round of people discovering the name proves.”
Here’s that amazing cease and desist letter, fifteen long years later, and now DJ Muppetfucker is once again being dragged into the public eye and is forced to deal with the reality that he once performed on stages under the name DJ Muppetfucker:
https://twitter.com/noahphex/status/797289825984462848
What a beautiful world we live in.
[h/t io9]