VAN NUYS, Calif. – In an apologetic press release issued late last week, adult entertainment studio Ergogenic Hardcore said a busy shooting schedule, various “personal issues” and ongoing litigation with a former employee caused the studio to overlook releasing its annual holiday-themed titles since September 2014.

“I’m really red-faced about the whole thing,” said Ergogenic Chief Executive Officer Peter Bosch. “We know how much Ergogenic fans look forward to our holiday titles, and I was simply mortified when I realized we hadn’t put out a holiday release since the 2014 Labor Day edition of our Pumped and Pregnant series.”

Rather than retroactively issue a separate title for each of the occasions the studio failed to mark over the past 10 months, Bosch said Ergogenic instead will put out a handful of “combo titles” to cover more than one holiday in each release.

The first “retro-holiday” title from Ergogenic is Mikey Maier’s Spanks-Giving which Bosch described as “a light BDSM feature set against the jaw-dropping beauty of the Great Plains in which a Master wearing a hockey mask and army uniform flogs hot chicks with turkey drumsticks.”

Shot on location just outside Dunning, Neb., Bosch said the new movie “hits all the right notes” in celebrating three beloved American holidays at once.

“We wanted to honor our veterans, give thanks to God for our national bounty, include a fun Halloween costume element, arouse the viewer and start a meaningful conversation about excessive holiday season binge-eating all at the same time,” said Bosch. “It’s a great way for people who are curious about BDSM to get their feet wet while appropriately remembering the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform — as well as our men and women in black leather and thigh-high boots.”

The second video in Ergogenic’s retro-holiday series — DJ St. Nix’s Pint-Size New Year’s Booty Call — celebrates Christmas, New Years and Martin Luther King Jr. Day with an interracial gangbang pairing well-hung African-American male performers with female “little persons” dressed like Christmas elves.

“In case you’re wondering, everybody in this movies is officially ‘naughty,’” Bosch said. “But when it comes to having your dick sucked without anybody involved needing to bend over, I think we can all agree that’s pretty nice.”

To retroactively ring-in Groundhog Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter, Ergogenic broke from its traditional role as a producer of straight hardcore and ventured into gay porn for the first time, a decision Bosch said resulted from “creative and efficient use of our budget and resources.”

“While we were shooting the DJ St. Nix movie, there were all these little people dudes hanging around waiting for their girlfriends to finish up, and a light bulb just went off in my head,” Bosch said. “Put these little dudes in tiny lederhosen and a hat with a belt buckle glued to it and — voila! — just like that, they’re leprechauns.”

The result of Bosch’s pornographic brainstorm, The Greatest Story Ever Balled, combines Biblical tradition, scatological humor and urban-mythological sexual references in one ambitious, potentially controversial package.

“Look, you can’t have cherished religious prophets as characters in a porn movie and expect there not to be some backlash,” said Bosch. “This is why in the movie, Jesus is always the ‘top’ and the leprechauns are the ones inserting toys, fists and various other questionable materials inside their nether regions.”

As for the Groundhog Day component of the movie, Bosch was tight-lipped in describing how such is related in the movie, saying only in the context of this particular film, “it’s not necessarily a hole in the ground from which everybody is waiting for the famous rodent to emerge.”

Ergogenic rounds out its retro-holiday releases with an attempt to combine five occasions — Arbor Day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day and Independence Day — into a single package. Bosch said the multi-holiday release was “almost too ambitious” and required “creative use of symbolism, foreshadowing, rigging, lube and carefully selected outdoor locations.”

“When it came to bringing in both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the obvious solution was to have a married couple as performers,” Bosch said. “What was harder was making those mesh with Arbor Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day without taking the whole thing too far over the top.”

To adroitly tackle all the creative challenges at once, Bosch sneaked his crew into Arlington National Cemetery for a night shoot, bringing with them a variety of important props and set pieces.

“We had our MILF and her husband climb up into one of the historic Atlas cedar trees they have on the grounds at Arlington, and a lot of the pre-sex dialog is about the tree, so we had our Arbor Day needs covered,” Bosch said.

Bosch noted the crew had the female performer wear a “Got MILF?” t-shirt to “hammer home the Mother’s Day thing even more,” but he maintained the scene’s “real genius” lies in the way Father’s Day was introduced to the visual mix.

“Most eyes will be drawn to the man’s left hand, which is holding the Roman Candle that’s firing out colorful spark-balls at regular intervals, but if you look closely at the homemade coffee mug in the man’s right hand, it has ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ painted on there,” Bosch said. “It’s probably a bit subtle for some viewers, but I think the dads in our audience definitely will notice and appreciate it — more than they appreciated all the neckties and socket wrenches their families bought them back in June, at least.”

Bosch said Ergogenic has learned from its 10-month holiday oversight and has taken steps to ensure there’s no repeat of the mistake in the year to come. At the same time, producing the retro-holiday titles has convinced him of the “efficiencies” of combining multiple occasions into single releases, so fans should expect more of the same in the future.

“We’re already hard at work on something combining a celebration of Labor Day and Rosh Hashana,” Bosch explained. “We’re hoping to feature the pairing of Joanna Angel with Colby Keller.”