Myth to Media
The titans, however, are the biggest disaster of depiction. In myth, there are twelve titans, sons and daughters of Ouranus (the sky) and Gaia (the earth). These titans preceded the Olympian gods, and in some stories controlled things such as the rising of the sun and moon, among other duties. In Disney’s Hercules, there are only five titans. Additionally, instead of being essentially larger, slightly more powerful gods, they take on the role of elemental natural disasters and one mythical creature: a lava blob (fire), an ice figure (water), a mountainous figure made of rocks (earth), a talking tornado (air), and a cyclops. They seem to serve little purpose other than to cause havoc, and hate Zeus—the latter being about the one thing the filmmakers got right.
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Additionally, though Greece was a famously polytheistic society, and we can see many of the gods, the film still heavily plays into Christian ideologies. The filmmakers modeled the Underworld after images of Hell, including dark, dingy imagery and flames, and Mount Olympus after images of Heaven, sitting on clouds with the “pearly gates” as the entrance (as shown by the concept art to the left). Accordingly, Hades is also modeled as a Devil figure and Zeus as a God figure. This is likely done for accessibility’s sake: creating an easily recognizable image of religion for modern audiences, mirroring older toga movies with Christian messages, and imbuing watchers with a direct sense of “good” and “evil.” The switch, however, like many of the above, is not an ideal one when translating Greek myth to the screen.
Myth and media have a long relationship, and not always a fond one. In the case of Hercules, heavy liberties are taken in terms of depiction of Greek myth and the gods.
One major example of this is the depiction of Hercules as the legitimate son of Zeus and Hera, with Alcmene and Amphitryon as his adoptive mortal parents. In myth, Amphitryon was a soldier, and “The night before Amphitryon was to return from… battle, Zeus came to Alcmene disguised as Amphitryon and lay with her. He made the night last three times longer than normal and Alcmene conceived Heracles [Hercules]” (Stewart 1996, 60). This leads to a slew of problems in Hercules’s life, including his having fits of violence inflicted by Hera in revenge. As adultery would be difficult to justify or depict in a Disney film, and may have dramatically altered the already thoroughly inventive plot, the filmmakers choose to omit this in favor of depicting a dated, more straightforwardly moral viewpoint: one of “monogamous companionate relationships and the nuclear family” (Blanshard & Shahabudin 2011, 212).
The depiction of the gods is yet another point of divergence from myth. The “background gods,” so to speak, majorly use color and costume to identify who is who: Ares is red and wears a stereotypical antiquated battle helmet; Dionysus is a wine-ish purple-magenta color, and has rosy cheeks as if drunk; Poseidon is seafoam green, has a fishtail for a beard, and carries his signature trident; and the list goes on, from pink and pretty Aphrodite to the sunrays crowning Apollo’s head. In this case, the gods’ domains do not necessarily depart from myth, which is nice to see—but their being depicted as having a serene family reunion at Hercules’s birth certainly does. The gods are never quite on that friendly of terms in any myth.