Hercules and the Millennial Generation

This chapter provides the foundation of the first section of the book and provides a detailed examination of the history of Hercules on screen. The Hercules corpus is separated into three clusters: European ancients from 1958 to 1965; the 1990s, which included the Hercules TV series and the Disney film; and finally the most recent productions of 2014. The chapter places the most recent productions in a tradition of the onscreen Hercules. It demonstrates the extensive scope of the Hercules corpus and reveals the inherent difficulties in determining what is part of the mythic tradition and what is not.