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.