Think of the great American brand names, and they usually have a rival for the top spot. Coke has its Pepsi, Levi's its Wrangler and McDonalds has Burger King. The exception is the Disney empire, which bestrides the hugely profitable world of animated feature films like a colossus, with no real alternatives.
Despite the increasing attempts of rival studios to gain a foothold in the animated feature market, the Mouse still reigns supreme. At the launch of its latest offering, Hercules, in the shadow of the Acropolis in Athens this week, the European media were introduced to this year's Disney offering, which promises to continue the cycle of hugely profitable animated blockbusters generated by the studio since its revival 10 years ago.
The new film's relationship to the original Hercules myth is tenuous - producer Alice Dewey acknowledges that the movie is "inspired by" rather than "based on" the chronicles. Anything likely to upset the tender susceptibilities of America's 10-year-olds has been ruthlessly pruned. There's no sign of the Aegean stables, the golden apples or the three-headed dog, Cerberus. Instead, "Herc", for it is he, is a wide-eyed American high-school jock type, raised by simple peasant folk in ignorance of the fact that he is half-man, half-god. As he matures into manhood, he comes under the tutelage of chubby satyr - Philoctetes - "Phil" (voiced by Danny De Vito), earns the enmity of Hades, Lord of the Underworld (voiced by James Woods as a sort of sleazy Hollywood agent type), and falls for the sultry Megara - "Meg" (Broadway actress Susan Egan). The story is narrated by five (instead of nine) Muses, who bear a remarkable similarity to the black girl groups of the 1960s.
You can choose to see all this as part of the deplorable Disneyfication of European culture, yet another example of American junk dumbing down our kids, but that would be a little unfair. Disney's Hercules is a typically brash and energetic appropriation of the myth, bending the story into an upbeat tale of triumph over adversity. Unsurprisingly, its values are those of Clinton's America rather than Pericles's Athens.
But it's far funnier and more entertaining than the company's other recent releases, such as the over-dark and somewhat confused Hunchback Of Notre Dame, or the irretrievably drippy and sentimental Pocahontas, and much closer in spirit and execution to 1994's Aladdin in its garish style and snappy pop cultural references, not surprisingly since writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements were also responsible for the earlier film.
Musker and Clements insist that their prime inspiration comes more from the screwball comedies directed by Preston Sturges and Frank Capra in the 1930s and 1940s than from any Greek myth. "We saw this film as being a comedy about the battle between idealism and cynicism, in the same way as some of those Sturges and Capra movies," says Musker.
"So Phil has given up hope of finding a real hero, and Meg has decided she can't trust men, and Hades is the ultimate cynic, but Hercules is the naive hero, the optimist."
The character of "Meg" is another example of the film's free and easy way with the story. In mythology, Megara was Hercules's second wife, and was killed by him. There's none of that here, but Meg may mark a breakthrough in the roll-call of Disney heroines, as the company's first (albeit implied) non-virginal female romantic lead.
As a character, Meg was based on Barbara Stanwyck in Sturges's The Lady Eve, says Clements. "She was especially interesting for us because she was so different from the other Disney heroines." He agrees that Disney's requirement for a General rating for its films in the US means that they operate under many of the same constraints faced by film-makers in the 1940s under the Hays Code. "It means you have to be cleverer about how you talk about these issues. They're for a general audience, and we make them so that they'll work on slightly different levels for adults and children."
Clements and Musker are breezily unashamed of the other liberties they've taken, also defending their reduction of the Muses from nine to five, and responding robustly to criticism from the Athens press of the absence of any Greek-based music in the movie.
"It was easier to animate five Muses instead of nine," says Muster matter-of-factly. "Because the movie is a sort of irreverent comedy, it seemed natural to have the chorus as these gospel divas, and it complemented the rest of the film, which we thought of as irreverent and contemporary. Also, gospel has that tradition of hope in the face of cynicism. We felt that traditional Greek music wouldn't have worked that well."
Film-makers in general, and Hollywood scriptwriters in particular, conscious of their status as modern mythmakers, tend to refer regularly to the fact that the rules of their craft were laid down more than two millennia ago by Greek dramatists, philosophers and storytellers, but the Greek myths themselves haven't provided particularly fertile ground for movies, restricted to the high-camp Italian-produced sword-and-sandal epics of the late 1950s, or to Ray Harryhausen's effects-driven adventures.
"There's a lot of sex and violence in the myths, and a lot of the adjustments that we made were specifically to deal with that," says Clements. "Also, we were always looking for that contemporary hook, to say that this is not so far away from now."
One of the movie's running gags is its spoof on the contemporary sports sponsorship phenomenon, with Hercules's face appearing on plates, clothes, and (of course) urns. When I mention that it's rather ironic to see a Disney production, of all things, mounting an attack, even such a gentle one, on merchandising and ask Musker and Clement what they think of the relationship between animation and advertising directed at children, it's not surprising that they take the company line against my "cynical" suggestion that the gag is a good way of deflecting criticism while maximising profits.
"I think both child and parent are consumers, and they don't have to buy this stuff," says Clement. "In our movie, the intention was satire, but some people interpreted it as product placement. There was a serious intention there, to say that fame and celebrity is not really what it's all about."
Whatever about that, Hercules is a welcome example of zippy Disney rather than drippy Disney, thanks in part to its directors, but also to veteran British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, who was drafted in as an adviser at an early stage. Scarfe's influence is particularly evident in the drawing of the delightfully nasty Hades, and his sidekicks, Pain and Panic. "They got so enthusiastic about the designs that my role grew, and they wanted me around for the whole three years of production so that I could oversee the whole movie, to give it `my look'," says Scarfe.
"I was warned at the beginning that they'd probably want to `Disney' my designs, but to my amazement, my ideas actually came through." "Some people think that Disney films are all the same, that they're all generated by the same people, but that really isn't true," says Musker. "There are different teams, and the movies reflect those different tastes and styles. Certainly both Aladdin and Hercules are more contemporary and more liberal than some of the other movies." He agrees with my suggestion that Aladdin and Hercules reflect more of a movie brat sensibility. "But we're not auteurists - the team has an important input."
"I've always been a great advocate for animation," says Scarfe, who clearly relished his role on Hercules, and is currently in negotiation for another film. "I always try to imagine what Matisse or Picasso would have done with animation. It's not just Disney - there are many, many ways of doing it."
Hercules opens on October 17th