I have to defend this movie.

Eighteen years have passed, but it seems like a lot of people still can't warm up to "Herkules". Most of the criticism is about how loosely it follows the ancient myths. Even someone like The Unshaved Mouse, who seems to mostly like the movie, has a joke that he pretends that Hera secretly is the mastermind behind everything that happened, despite the fact that Hades clearly was the villain in this version. And it seems like this movie became particularly disliked in Greece! But that is just bull**** in my opinion, for three different reasons...

1: Disney have almost always done their own thing, when they have adapted an older story. "The Jungle Book", "The Rescuers", "The Fox and the Hound", "The Little Mermaid", "Beauty & the Beast", "Pocahontas", "Hunchback of Notre-Dame", "Mulan", "Tarzan"... Those are just some of the examples of the countless Disney movies, who don't seem to follow the source material too closely. But I don't see that many complaints about Disney doing their own thing with anything else. So why are people so hard on "Herkules"?

2: What did these people expect Disney to do? Depict how Zeus not only cheated on his wife, but also tricked his great grand-daughter into having sex with him without knowing it? Not to mention that Hercules was turned insane by Hera, until he actually had killed his own children! Yeah, I know that some other re-tellings of Greek mythology for kids won't hide that many details. But did anyone really expect Disney to make such a movie?

3: Greek mythology, just like all the other mythologies, is based on a long oral tradition. People in several different places kept telling these stories for centuries, so there must have been several different versions going around. And we only happen to know the ones, which somebody at some point wrote down on a piece of paper... And yes, I know that the Greeks are proud of their ancient history and culture. Which they also should be! And yes, I know that Greek mythology has lots of fans in other countries as well, and I count myself as one of them. But I still think that you can take more liberties with folk tales and mythology than with actual fiction.

Intelligence and purity.