Editor's Note: For our review of Hercules we asked Dr. John Rundin, a University of California at Los Angeles Classics Professor, to compare this beautiful Disney romp to the ancient classic tales.

© Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

If the film Hercules had told the story of Hercules as it was known to the ancients, the Disney Corporation would be in far more trouble with the Southern Baptists than it is now. Perhaps the Baptists might have overlooked Hercules' vocation for homicide. In the course of his life, he was responsible for the death of, among others, his first wife Megara, three of his children, his girlfriend Hippolyta, his martial arts instructor Chiron and his music instructor Linus. Conservative eyebrows might have been raised, however, at the circumstances of Hercules' conception. He was conceived when Zeus, though married to Hera, made love with Alcmene in one of his numerous adulterous dalliances; Alcmene was a happily married woman, and to overcome her scruples Zeus had to fool her by disguising himself as her husband. Hercules' own sex life would certainly have been found objectionable. In one exploit, he is reported -- while drunk, yet -- to have impregnated the fifty daughters of Thespius in a single night. Certainly the Baptists would have felt obligated to censure his transvestitism while he served as the boy-toy of Queen Omphale, not to mention his enthusiastically pederastic affair with the boy Hylas.

Pegasus the flying horse, Phil the hero-training satyr, and Hercules,the boy wonder enter the dark city of Thebes, aka "The Big Olive." © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

Divine Inspiration
None of this adult material makes it into Disney's highly entertaining children's movie, Hercules, which has only scattered and garbled points of contact with the ancient tradition. In the ancient stories, Hercules has to rescue his new bride and second wife, Deianeira, when the centaur Nessus tries to rape her as she rides across a river on the centaur's back. In the Disney version of the story, Nessus is wading through a river and carrying on with Megara, who, according to the ancients, is Hercules' first wife, when Hercules comes upon the two of them and, seeing Megara for the first time, tries to rescue her from the centaur. This is typical of the way that Hercules uses the ancient sources. It takes a bit from here and a bit from there and assembles the bits into a new whole. In the Disney story, Hercules rides Pegasus, fights the Minotaur and encounters the Gorgon. In the ancient tradition these are the deeds of other heroes. There is much pure invention in the film as well. The satyr Philoctetes, a cutesy Disney innovation, serves as Hercules' trainer. The treatment of ancient art is much the same as the treatment of ancient narrative. Obviously, the creators of Hercules spent some time looking at Greek art as they did reading Greek stories of heroes. Clever takes and parodies on Greek vases, sculpture and architecture abound in the movie. Yet these details are subordinate to a modern artistic vision. This inventive recycling of ancient narrative and art is not bad, and, in fact, not too different from the ways in which the ancients themselves constantly reworked traditional materials. But don't imagine you will learn much about the Classical world by viewing the movie; it's far more concerned with modern life in the United States.