A kindly couple rescues him from Pain and Panic, who have morphed into two serpents. The baby fails to drink every drop, which leaves him with superhuman strength. Hades, lord of the underworld, dispatches his hapless henchmen Pain and Panic to kidnap baby Herc and feed him a potion to make the god-child fully mortal and therefore not a threat to Hades’ plans to mount a “hostile takeover” of Olympus. Movie: The entirely legitimate infant son of Zeus and his loving wife Hera. Hera later commands Eurystheus to be Herc’s taskmaster, testing the man-god with various adventures called the “Twelve Labors.” Hera, Zeus’ goddess wife, is not pleased about the love child’s existence and sends two serpents to his cradle, but the precocious infant strangles them. Myth: The son of Zeus and Alcmene, a mortal woman. Nobody was fool enough to market a “Deliverance” Happy Meal, and inasmuch as kids’ movies these days are as much commercials for the licensed merchandise as anything else, the Disneyfication of myth, legend and literature makes good business sense. Understandably, Disney will sell a lot more loot to the wee ones with its sugary version than with one true to its literary sources. His challenge is to become a brave warrior and avoid the pitfalls of celebrity while on a journey of self-discovery. Herc is kidnapped by agents of Hades, turned nearly mortal, and grows up as a klutzy teenager. In the Disney version, Zeus and Hera are a happily married pair who give birth to a bouncing baby god, Hercules.

Uranus, by the way, was married to his mother.

He married his sister and castrated his father, Uranus, before deposing him. His daddy, Zeus, got to be king of the gods after making his own royal father, Cronus, disgorge all of Zeus’ brothers and sisters, who then whipped their papa and put him in prison. Hercules may have been an Olympian blueblood, but his forebears were pure trash. Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, tried to kill the baby Hercules and, failing that, later caused him to go mad, leading him to slaughter his wife, Megara, and their three children. In tales from antiquity, Hercules was the bastard son of the god Zeus and a human mistress. Gone from the Disney version, presumably down the same sinkhole that swallowed the grim, heart-rending tragedy of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” are the madness, murder, incest and cannibalism of the Greek gods. Say what you will about Michael Eisner, he’s a darn sight more family-friendly than the ancient Greeks. Woe to you, Southern Baptist parents, if the animated film “Hercules” inspires your impressionable youngster to investigate the classical roots of Disney’s contemporized and sanitized story.

Is hercules really the on of zeus