In the Disney film, Hercules' popularity skyrockets and manifests in ways that are much more recognizable to the 1990s: there are credit cards inspired by him, special food and drink, and even a pair of sandals called the Air Hercules. This connection, at least for the directors, was based on how Hercules' stories were documented on vases and books. This premise was all well and good, and leaned heavy on a modern comparison between Hercules and ultra-rich superstars like Michael Jordan. Once on Earth, Hercules is turned mortal but with godlike strength, after which he tries to be a hero to the people of Thebes and eventually has to decide whether being a god is more important to him than being loved by another human. The Disney version instead posits Hercules as the beloved child of Zeus and Hera, who is stolen by minions of Hades himself, as the big blue bad guy wants to overthrow humanity and sees that Hercules is the only one standing in his way. As Musker said at the time of the film's release, ""In a Disney film, issues of philandering and illegitimacy are a little hard to handle." (Please note, Hercules arrived just a year after The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a film with a number of hard-to-handle topics that didn't hit quite as big as hoped.) In the Disney telling, a good deal of the tragic Greek violence of the myths is absent, as is any implication that Hercules is an illegitimate child of the god to end all gods, Zeus. As Musker later said, "We thought it would be our opportunity to do a 'superhero' movie, Ron and I being comic book fans." Decades before superhero movies were in vogue, there was another way that Musker and Clements - who are among the five credited writers on the final script, along with Donald McEnery, Bob Shaw, and Irene Mecchi - were able to frame Hercules' journey while sanding down the origins.
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Though the final film takes a vastly different tack with Hercules, who still learns how to be humble and the true meaning of heroism, the pitch was enough to lure Musker and Clements onboard.
The other four projects have never come to fruition.) Pitched by animator Joe Haidar, this version of Hercules would learn humility after being sought after by both sides in the Trojan War. One became Pocahontas, while the story of Sinbad would eventually go to DreamWorks Animation with Katzenberg, in a 2003 film featuring the voice of Brad Pitt. Look at this brief article from the Chicago Tribune in the summer of 1992, which talks about six projects in some form of development. (Let's pause briefly and talk a bit about the development process at Disney: plenty of projects get thrown out as ideas, and many of those were able to get to a point of being talked about publicly. (As mentioned here before, though Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company in 1994, his presence in the Disney Renaissance lingers.) The idea that intrigued Musker and Clements most, of those pitched during one of Disney's Gong Shows, was a retelling of the Greek myth of Hercules.
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The compromise that Katzenberg arrived at with the directors in 1993 was simple: if they made one more movie of his choosing, they could then make the film that became Treasure Planet. Sadly, as Musker himself later recounted, neither Jeffrey Katzenberg nor Thomas Schumacher were excited by the notion of an outer-space pirate movie. With two big hits under their collective belt, the directing duo returned once more to an idea that had inflamed them with excitement: a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island set in space. Musker and Clements had not wanted to make Hercules after the success of Aladdin. Hercules, the 1997 film directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, takes little time in emphasizing that it would be following the same route Aladdin did, to slightly diminishing returns.
Or they could avoid modernity all together with their next film. For its directors, the two men who had played a major part in ushering in the era of the Renaissance, they could follow up this success with a new film that either tried to once again blend the timeless with a modern sensibility. But one of the biggest successes of the Disney Renaissance was a film that somehow managed to be both timeless and very much of its time: the 1992 animated comedy Aladdin. Some of the studio's most charming masterpieces don't feel like cinematic time capsules they can be experienced at any age without the audience feeling lost. ) One of the best qualities of Disney feature animation is that it can be timeless. In today's column, he discusses the 1997 film Hercules.
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( Revisiting the Renaissance is a bi-weekly series in which Josh Spiegel looks back at the history and making of the 13 films of the Disney Renaissance, released between 19.
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