Hercules (1997)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Disney's Hercules begins by discarding the very fact that makes Heracles a hero in Greek religious memory: his illegitimacy. In the myths preserved by ancient sources, Heracles is the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, born from Zeus's adultery and raised under Hera's lasting hostility, hostility that later drives him mad and leads him to kill his own wife and children, a crime he spends his labors atoning for. The film erases all of it. Its Zeus and Hera are shown as Hercules's married, loving parents, and Hera's traditional role, in Greek religious understanding of Heracles's story, as the god who curses and torments him, is emptied out entirely and handed instead to Hades, a figure closer in the myths to a remote lord of the dead than a scheming villain.

The film compounds the change elsewhere: onscreen, Hercules himself slays Medusa, a feat ancient sources attribute to Perseus, a different hero from a different story.

Greek reaction, when the film opened in Athens in December 1997 under the retitled Beyond the Myth of Heracles, was pointed rather than diffuse. Vasillis Lambrinodakis, an antiquities expert at the University of Athens, said the studio should have changed the characters' names if it wanted this much freedom with them. Yiannis Tzedakis, director of antiquities at Greece's Culture Ministry, called the result a distorted portrayal of the Herculean myth, adding plainly that the film was not made for Greece. Explanatory booklets, distributed at Greek screenings, told audiences outright that the film was not a lesson in mythology, an admission built into the release itself that the story onscreen and the story Greek religious tradition tells about its own hero are not the same one.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hercules reached theaters on June 13, 1997, directed by John Musker and Ron Clements for Walt Disney Feature Animation, the same directing pair behind The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Tate Donovan voiced the grown Hercules, Susan Egan voiced Megara, and Danny DeVito voiced the satyr trainer Philoctetes, but the performance singled out most consistently in reviews was James Woods as Hades, lord of the underworld, reimagined here as a fast talking, deal making antagonist rather than the comparatively neutral ruler of the dead found in most ancient sources. Critics compared the energy of his line readings to Robin Williams's Genie in Aladdin, and the casting became the film's most praised creative choice even as its handling of the wider mythology drew objection.

The film frames its story through a gospel influenced chorus of Muses, who narrate Hercules's rise in the style of a stage musical rather than a straightforward retelling, a structural choice that marks the film as openly theatrical rather than attempting a documentary style account of Greek religious tradition. Reviews were largely positive on release, and the film holds an eighty three percent approval score on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, though some critics found its animation rushed compared to Disney's own recent work and its backgrounds simplified.

No source consulted for this entry records any revision made to the film in response to the Greek objections that met its release, nor any later reconciliation between the studio and the officials who raised them; the criticism and the film's theatrical framing appear to have simply continued on separate tracks.