Hercules…for Americans

Dr. Vince TomassoRomance and Classical Languages, Ripon College

The Disneyfication of a Greek Myth

The Greek Newspaper Adsmevtos Typos on Disney’s Hercules (1997)

“This is another case of foreigners distorting our history and culture just to suit their commercial interests.”

Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films by M. Keith Booker

“This is a film designed for fun, not for paying respect to the cultural past, an attitude that can sometimes make it highly entertaining, but that participates in a particularly obvious way in the slow erosion of historical sense to which Disney’s films have been contributing since Snow White [1937].”

Time Magazine critic Richard Corliss

“Don’t look for this plot in Bulfinch.”

Co-Director Ron Clements

“Hercules appealed to us because it didn’t seem as sacred a thing as something like the Odyssey. We had to feel that whatever we chose, we would be able to take quite a few liberties.”

Co-Director John Musker on the Hercules DVD

“We call this thing an ‘epic comedy’, so playing comedy against people’s expectations of Greek mythology, which are often kind of stuffy or something academic, and we tried to make it very contemporary and accessible.”

Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy by Barbara J. Bono

Transvaluation is “...an artistic act of historical self-consciousness that at once acknowledges the perceived values of the antecedent text and transforms them to serve the uses of the present.”

Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films by M. Keith Booker

“Children’s films can...have a profound impact at the level of promoting certain fundamental attitudes and basic expectations concerning what the world is like and how one should live in it.”

The Virtuous HeroXenophon’s Memorabilia, trans.

Trzaskoma, Smith, and BrunetSections 27 and 28:“From what I know of you I have

hopes, if you take my path, that you might become a greater doer of noble and righteous deeds and that I might be thought even more honored and distinguished for goodness. … The gods do not give anything that is really good and noble to mortals without labor and effort.”

“Hercules Between Virtue and Vice” (Jan van den Hoecke, 1647-51

The Suffering HeroEuripides’ Heracles, trans. HalleranLines 1196-7:AMPHITRYON: You couldn’t know

another mortalWho has suffered more and been

forced to wander more.

Line 1289:HERACLES: …this final labor I, the

sufferer, endured krater, 4th BC

The Suffering HeroThe Homeric Hymn to Heracles (6th

BC?), trans. WestLines 4-6:Formerly he roamed the vastness of

land and sea at the behest of king Eurystheus, causing much suffering himself and enduring much…

metope from the temple of Zeus (Olympia, Greece, late 5th BC)

Death: the High Cost of Living

Homer’s Iliad, trans. LombardoBook 15 lines 187-198:“He may be strong, but this is outrageous,To force me, his peer, to stop against my will.We three brothers, whom Rhea bore to Cronus,Zeus, myself, and Hades, lord of the dead,Divided up the universe into equal shares.When we shook the lots, I got the grey seaAs my eternal domain; Hades, the nether gloom;Zeus, the broad sky with clouds and bright air.Earth and high Olympus remain common to all.I will not follow Zeus’ whims. Mighty as he is,Let him remain content with his third share,And not try to frighten me as if I were a coward.”

terracotta plaque, Locri, Italy, 6th BC

The Beast in MeEuripides’ Heracles, trans. HalleranLines 835-42:IRIS: And against this man drive, stir

upFits of madness, disturbances of

mind to kill his children,…Otherwise the gods are nowhereAnd mortal things will be great, if he

doesn’t pay the penalty.

Attic pelike (early 5th BC)

Reception Studies by Lorna Hardwick

“Reception practice and its analysis reveals both commonalities and differences between ancient and modern. The shifting balance between commonalities and differences undermines the crudely polarized positions that classical texts either address universal and unchanging aspects of human nature or that they are remote and alien with nothing of value to offer to post-classical experience” (p. 11).

Bibliography• Blanshard, A. 2005. Hercules: a Heroic Life. Granta.• Blanshard, A. and K. Shahabudin. 2011. Classics on Screen. Ancient Greece and Rome

on Film. Bristol Classical Press.• Bono, B. J. 1984. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean

Tragicomedy. University of California Press.• Booker, M. K. 2010. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films.

Praeger.• Burkert, W. 1985. Greek Religion. Trans. J. Raffan. Harvard University Press.• Byrne, E. and M. McQuillan. 1999. Deconstructing Disney. Pluto Press (yikes!).• Corliss, R. 2001. “A Hit from a Myth.” Time Magazine.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137905,00.html• Halleran, M. R. 1988. The Heracles of Euripides. Focus Classical Library.• Hardwick, L. 2003. Reception Studies. Oxford University Press.• Lombardo, S. 1997. Iliad. Hackett.• Smith, R. S. and S. M. Trzaskoma. 2007. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae.

Hackett. • Stafford, E. 2012. Herakles. Routledge.• Ward, A. R. 2002. Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of the Disney Animated Film.

University of Texas Press.