1     When Hercules, greatest of Greek mythical heroes, went to Hades to bring back the hell-hound Cerberus for his 12th and final Labor, he met the phantom of the dead hero Meleager.  Smitten by the charms of the handsome hunter, Hercules made advances which Meleager rejected, whereupon Hercules asked him, "Since I can't have you, is there anyone in the world above like you?"  "Yes," said Meleager, "my sister Deianeira not only looks like me, but she's a great huntress and fighter, practically an Amazon." 
      Many years later, Hercules won the hand of Deianeira after a great duel with the river-god Acheloos.  At the wedding reception a young boy serving finger-bowls to the guests accidentally spilled water on Hercules' robe; the hero took the bowl, hit the boy with it, and killed him.  This is the same Hercules who, as a young boy, reacted to a reprimand from his music teacher Linus by hitting him on the head with a lyre and killing him.
      Is this material for a Disney cartoon?  Hardly — nor is most of the ancient myth of Hercules, who sacked innumerable cities and won countless princesses, only to kill them, abandon them, or give them away, and whose only lasting emotional relationships were with other men.  The ancient Hercules' attitude towards women is exemplified in his first heroic deed:  while hunting the Lion of Thespiae, he stayed with King Thespius, who, in one of the several farmer's daughter/travelling salesman stories of Greek myth, told Hercules that he would have to share a room with his daughter (the king wanted to include Zeus, Hercules' father, in his family tree); that night the king sent in all 50 of his daughters, 49 of whom Hercules got pregnant while never realizing that there was more than one.
2      Since I had studied the Hercules myth for some 30 years, I was quite curious when Alice Dewey, producer of Disney Animation's 1997 feature Hercules, asked me to take her and the movie's directors, lyricist, and chief artistic personnel to Greece and Turkey for a 2-week research tour.  How, I wondered, could they possibly translate this horrific myth into a film Uncle Walt would approve of?
      The answer wasn't long in coming.  I was given the script to read, and I immediately realized that I was looking at a new myth:  not a cleaned-up, sugar-coated version of the Greek story, but rather a modern interpretation, a myth for our time (and, I'm sure, another blockbuster for Disney Animation).
      Since this isn't a movie review, I won't discuss plot details here.  What follows is a description of the trip I took with the Disney team and what I learned from them about the successful transformation of an ancient myth into a modern cartoon. 
3     Our adventure began in Athens, with obligatory visits to the Acropolis, Cape Sounion, and the National Museum.   The Disney people stayed at an execrable 5-star hotel (as their contract demanded), while I fled to the familiar surroundings of the 3-star Hotel Austria in a residential neighborhood just south of the Acropolis (the best-located and, in my view, best all-around hotel in Athens).
      Next we went to Delfi, where once again I deserted the Disneys for the 3-star Akropol, one of the nicest hotels in Greece.  Everyone was duly impressed by the ruins of the Oracle of Apollo with its breathtaking vista, but the real excitement of Delphi came when Roger Gould, the computer whiz who created the 30-headed Hydra of Hercules, hurt his foot while cavorting in the ancient gymnasium.  We whisked Roger by taxi some 15 miles to the nearest health clinic at Amfissa, where the genial doctor took one look at Roger's big toe, sticking up at a right angle from his foot, then without a word grabbed it and gave it an enormous yank.  Roger's scream was worthy of one of Hercules' victims, but the foot was as good as new.
       At dawn on Easter Sunday those who had gone to bed arose and joined the all-night revellers in preparing the Easter lamb on spits before every house.  People were dancing in the streets, bouzouki music filled the town, but we had to leave for the mainland, since our whirlwind schedule required us to go that day to Meteora, Mount Olympus, and Thessalonica in the evening.
      However, perhaps in anticipation of the hangover (or at least extreme drowsiness) which afflicts virtually all Greek men by Easter afternoon, we discovered that the authorities had cancelled all ferries and hydrofoils to the mainland that day.  Fortunately we found a local fisherman with a small speed-boat, who took us, six at a time and screaming all the way, through high waves and bumpy sea some 30 miles to a tiny village on the Pelion peninsula.
      No matter how many times one has visited the Meteora, it remains an awe-inspiring sight.  Two dozen old Orthodox monasteries cling precariously to the tops of sheer rock pinnacles in a bizarre landscape shaped by eons of wind and rain.  Meteora was the principal location for the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, and those who know Meteora will recognize its likeness in the Hydra Valley where Hercules fights his climactic battle with Roger's multi-headed monster.
      In Thessalonica we met good news and bad news.  The bad news was that the local museum, which houses the spectacular finds from the tomb of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, was closed for Easter Monday.  We went to the museum anyway, where we had the following conversation through a barred entrance with the two attendants within.

 "I'm a famous American professor with a very important group." 
 "Klisto (closed)."
 "We have a special permit from the Ministry of Tourism."
 "Signomi, apagorevete (sorry, no way)."
 "But this is Walt Disney!".
 "Figete (go away)."

      But the shock of discovering that some doors were closed even to Disney was more than compensated for by the spectacular night we spent at a taverna in Ladadika, an old petrol warehouse district in the harbor.  The petrol companies disappeared long ago, and the Greek government has given generous gentrification grants for the restoration of the warehouses as restaurants and tavernas specializing in traditional music and dance.  Thessalonica has always been the best place to hear traditional Greek music, especially bouzouki and the folk blues called rebbetika, and we stayed until 4 a.m. eating, drinking, and dancing.  Everyone in the place threw rose petals and colored napkins at the dancers until the floor was a foot deep in color, and, since there was no dance floor, every one of the Disney crew joined the locals in semi-erotic dancing on top of the great wooden tables.
       Our next stop was Istanbul, but we had time for only an evening and morning in that exotic and wonderful city.  We partied again at the Kimene ("Who Cares") restaurant in the fabled Flower Passage, made quick trips to Agia Sofia and the Underground Palace, then flew to Izmir to spend the rest of our trip on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts.
      The magnificent ancient sites at Pergamum, Ephesus, Miletus, and Didyma, however, were not to hurry through, and the team photographed and videotaped virtually every inch of the ruins.  We celebrated director Ron Clements' birthday at Selcuk (the modern town of Ephesus) by inviting the town's best belly dancers (yet another party!), then headed south. 
      Much of the trip from Kusadasi to Marmaris passes through beautiful wooded farmland, and it was here that we searched for the thatch-roofed farmhouse in which Hercules was raised.  Our quest for the perfect farmhouse made the trip twice as long as usual, but also twice as exciting.  Every 5 or 10 minutes, it seemed, someone in the back of the bus would shout "Stop the bus!"  The whole group then grabbed cameras and ran from the bus in every direction, like escapees from a prison bus, looking for the right angle from which to shoot the farmhouse and its environs. 
      After a stop at Euromus, where a 2nd century AD temple of Zeus has always stood in a serene pastoral setting amid olive groves, we arrived at Marmaris on the Mediterranean and boarded two yachts for a 2-day cruise along the Turquoise Coast.
      Our time on the yachts (locally handmade 23-meter wooden gulets) was a welcome respite from the parties of the last three nights.  We took time for a trip up the River Dalyan to see ancient Caunus and the famous 2400-year-old temple-tombs carved into the rock cliffs above the river, and we hiked for three hours across the wilderness peninsula on the west side of Fethiye Bay, but most of our time was given to swimming, relaxation, and conversation.
      Still Disney will be Disney, and sailing from cove to cove along the most scenic coastline in the Mediterranean, in these unique and beautiful gulets, seemed quite appropriate for the Disney team (made in Disneyland, one might say).  Soon yachts were being pursued and boarded while taunts and challenges were hurled from one buccaneer to the other, and the Pirates of the Caribbean had come to Turkey.
      We left the yachts at Fethiye and drove around the mountainous Lykian peninsula, as fierce and wild a landscape today as its ancient inhabitants were said to be.  At Tlos, my favorite site in Turkey, we clambered down a steep path, swung from a tree limb, and climbed a rustic wooden ladder to get to a ledge where we could see the "Tomb of Bellerophon,"  a chamber carved into the cliff with a temple-like facade on which was sculpted a relief of a caped rider on a winged horse (Pegasus, no doubt).
       At Aspendus we were invited to a picnic at the home of the local muhtar (mayor).  Nuri Yilmaz is a yoruk (nomad tribesman), and many members of the Yilmaz clan have abandoned their wandering life of sheep-herding in the vast stretches of the Toros Mountains to establish permanent homes around Aspendus in the lush delta of the Eurymedon River. 
      Shortly before our arrival Nuri had been elected mayor, a victory facilitated by the fact that nearly all the voters were named Yilmaz and Nuri was the only candidate.  Since I had known Nuri and his family long before he acquired political eminence, and since this was the final stop in our 2-week tour, we all decided that a picnic with the mayor, replete with local color, native food, and the company of a nomad family at the foot of one of the world's great ancient monuments, would be a Grand Conclusion.  Nuri's wife Halime made gozleme (Nomad tortillas) and his daughters Dudu and Fatma served us copious food and drink, and it truly was Grand (so grand, in fact, that I have taken all my tour groups since then to a picnic with Nuri). 
4      I have thought much about my trip with   Disney in the two years since we went.  They were young (the producer and directors were in their forties, and the others were in their twenties and thirties), and they were quite unselfconsciously absorbed in their work.  I had thought at first that the trip would be somewhat of a junket, and this may even have been one of Disney's intentions.  Work on the film had reached a watershed and time off for some R & R seemed appropriate; halfway through the nearly five years it takes to make a Disney animated feature, preliminary preparation was completed and the number of people engaged in the enterprise was about to increase tenfold as they entered full-scale  production. 
      But this was a vacation for Hercules, not from Hercules.  The crew talked incessantly about the project, they took thousands of photographs and miles of videotape, and there was scarcely a moment when someone wasn't drawing on the ubiquitous sketch-pads. 
      The group was quintessential Disney.  Humor and laughter were always present, and so were young children.  Wherever we stopped, Greek or Turkish kids seemed magnetically drawn to us, and all the group members (especially director John Musker) would dash off caricatures or drawings of Disney characters and pass them out.  And they all, especially the artists, were intensely visual; as producer Alice Dewey told me, "If you want to communicate with these Disney people, don't write it down — draw a picture."
      I had been visiting and studying the ancient monuments we saw for nearly 30 years, but the Disney people taught me how to see these things in a new way.  Their relentless search for detail and perspective put everything, whether temples or sculptures or simply gorgeous scenery, in a new light.  The architectural refinements of the Parthenon, routinely disseminated to years of classes and tour groups, received new life when seen through the artist's eye.
      Most of all, I appreciated being present at the birth of a new myth.  As I mentioned at the outset, the surviving myth of Hercules is hardly suitable for a Disney cartoon.  But the script of Musker and co-director Ron Clements took many of the elements of the Greek myth and rearranged them in a new structure that was novel and coherent, yet retained much of the mythic essence of the ancient narrative. 
      This, of course, is not so different from what ancient poets and dramatists did; the Hercules myth of the 8th century (the time of the earliest surviving material) is different from that of the 6th century, and that in turn differs from portrayals of the 5th century.  Hercules could even appear quite differently in separate works by one writer, as Euripides' plays demonstrate.
      But there is an essential Hercules, just as there is an essential function of myth, and this is what the Disney people got right.  Myth has many roles and uses — it entertains, it amuses, it teaches, it justifies, and so on — but its primary function is psychological:  to bring about (even for adults) the recapture of primal satisfaction, through the often-symbolic representation of childhood wishes, fears, and fantasies (which persist, even in the adult mind). 
      The Greek myth of Hercules, with all its gratuitous violence and its strange (to us) sexual needs and behavior, is the most complicated and various of all myths.  Yet this bewildering complexity is comprised of countless variations on three main themes:  to find the right female, who is ultimately the good and nurturant mother; to establish masculine identity through a series of trials and demonstrations of virility; and to win immortality.  And these three themes may be summarized, at least for Hercules, in the son's quest to win the object of desire by replacing, or at least proving himself equal to, his father.
      If you think about these themes when you see the movie Hercules, you will see how they recur, in both old and new ways, throughout the film.  In the movie as in the ancient myth, life appears as a never-ending series of trials and labors in which the hero strives to deal with the multiple representations of the parental objects of childhood fear and desire.  The ultimate goal, always sought but never reached, is radically and impossibly nostalgic:  to restore the absolute bliss of earliest childhood while at the same time achieving an individual and significant identity.
      This is what the myth is about; in fact, it is what all myth is primarily about.  It also happens to be what life is about.  And, at least as I can judge from reading the script, seeing the pictures, and hearing the ideas of its creators, it is what the movie Hercules is about.  And that is one of the reasons I am happy not only to have participated in the Disney trip but also to have seen first-hand the creation of a new myth.