Step back in time and check out the top five porn bestsellers from 1997! (Return to the AE Blog next month for a countdown of 1998’s most popular movies, followed by later years over the ensuing months.) How many do you remember?

Bad Wives

“It is never the movie you think it is going to be,” declared Adult Empire reviewer Spooky in his take on Bad Wives. For all their many virtues, porn movies are rarely unpredictable, so the shifting nature of Bad Wives‘ plot definitely sets it apart from your typical adult fare. The movie was an early misfire for DVD’s much-ballyhooed interactive possibilities, offering 26 scenes with four different camera angles for each and every one! Panned by critics, this technical coup didn’t entirely work, but the movie itself (still available on VOD without extra features) is an entertaining slice of late-’90s feature fun. The twisty plot about bored suburbanites anticipates the success of both the MILF genre and mid-2000s TV hits like Desperate Housewives.

Bobby Sox

“The First TRUE Adult DVD Title is Here!” Strange as it may seem in this era of tube sites and streaming, there was a time not so long ago when there was literally just one single porn movie available in a digital format. It was Vivid‘s Bobby Sox, the first adult DVD ever released and the first ever sold here at Adult Empire! (Now you are fully prepared to win a round of pervy Trivial Pursuit!) Like most porn releases from the early DVD days, Bobby Sox has an elaborate plot, and like Bad Wives, it was directed by award-winning filmmaker Paul Thomas. As Adult Empire’s in-house reviewer noted at the time, Bobby Sox the movie is hardly an all-time classic, but it still merits attention thanks to its status as a trailblazer. It also boasts an impressive nine sex scenes, a generous contrast with the four or five that is typical in recent porn DVDs.

Where The Boys Aren’t #9

These days we have long-running series like Women Seeking Women and Lesbian Seductions to satisfy our all-girl cravings, but in the 1990s, Where The Boys Aren’t reigned supreme! (Vivid even proudly advertised it as “Adult’s Most Successful All-Girl Series”!) Confusingly, this particular movie in the series was advertised as simply Where The Boys Aren’t on its cover, but it is actually the ninth installment (though the first to appear on DVD). The action is heavy on oral sex, sex toy play, and props, featuring a cast of big names of the day, including Chasey Lain, Nikki Tyler, Christy Canyon, and more. Like Bad Wives, Where The Boys Aren’t #9 originally included a multi-angle option, which has been done away with for the VOD version. A further 10 installments were released before Vivid ended the series in 2008.

The Audition

Unlike most of the other movies on this list, The Audition didn’t feature a multi-angle function on its initial DVD release. In fact, the back cover feels the need to apologize for this fact, an interesting insight into the expectations of the early porn DVD customers. “There is no multi-angle feature on these discs, but they more than compensate for this with the action. These wave titles are a little more hard-core than the standard Vivid DVDs,” Vivid’s ad copy notes, and there’s plenty of explicit action to back the statement up. Interestingly, the “auditions” of the title are not the usual porn casting-call scenarios but rather a look at what driven dancers will do to make it big. (The all-girl threesome in the expanse of the dancing practice room is particularly fun.)

The World’s Luckiest Man

There are 25 women on the movie’s memorable cover, but that’s only a quarter of the female cast members that appear! When the credits roll, the cast list is so long it looks like the visual effects team from a CGI-heavy movie like Lord of the Rings or The Avengers. Jon Dough is the lucky fellow who gets to enjoy the company of this fleet of beauties, in an array of surprisingly varied action. Other movies might have taken the “easy” route and simply gone for a blowbang or bukkake, but Luckiest Man maximizes the premise with group-sex combinations of all sorts. There’s even a bizarre scene where a lineup of women clench tennis balls between their butt cheeks while bending over a tennis net! (Adding a note of quasi-prestige, Larry Flynt himself shows up at the beginning to introduce the movie.)