Hercules, hero of song and story/Hercules, winner of ancient glory…
Hercules helped inspire Superman, and in 1963 Superman helped inspire Hercules — the syndicated Trans-Lux series of five-minute cartoons.
The Mighty Hercules had a distinctive Joe Shuster-like squint, and the stylized red H on his belt resembled Superman’s red S insignia. He could leap tall mountains in a single bound. Like Captain Marvel, the demigod summoned his powers in a flash of magic lightning.
“When you need a superhero that doesn’t require much time and effort for development, but comes pre-equipped with excellent name recognition, and yet doesn’t require paying royalties — you can’t do much better than Hercules,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “There were Hercules series in the early days of comic books, from Quality Comics, Fox Feature Syndicate and other publishers; and in latter-day comics, Marvel Comics uses a version of him as an ongoing character.
“And when animated cartoons started doing superheroes instead of relying almost exclusively on humor, Hercules was one of the first to appear — The Mighty Hercules was syndicated to local TV stations starting in 1963.”
“The show generally used Greek myths as the inspiration for its episodes, but used the influences oddly,” Wikipedia notes. “Daedalus is the evil wizard who is Hercules’s most frequent foe in the cartoon, but in Greek mythology Daedalus was a skilled artisan who was rarely villainous. Cacus, the giant of the first episode, is based on the mythological monster Cacus. Other recurring creatures – such as the Nemean lion, the Lernaean Hydra, the Erymanthian Boar and the Stymphalian birds — were taken directly from the Twelve Labors of Hercules but, unlike in the Twelve Labors, most of the creatures are not presented in the cartoon as trials for Hercules to overcome.”In the first episode, Hercules, having won an athletic contest against his friend Theseus, is granted the right to leave Mount Olympus and protect his mortal friends. Warning the demigod that he would lose his powers on Earth, Zeus creates a magic ring that will enable Hercules to periodically import his supernatural powers into the natural world.
“The production company was Trans-Lux Television Productions, also responsible for the ’60s TV version of Felix the Cat,” Markstein noted. “The man in charge, Joe Oriolo, also co-created Casper the Friendly Ghost. The writers were George Kashdan and Jack Miller, both of whom also worked in that capacity, and as editors, at DC Comics. (Kashdan also had a hand in the creation of Tommy Tomorrow, and Miller in that of Rip Hunter, Time Master.)”
“The character design — more ‘Captain Marvel’ than classic Greek — was clean-cut and precise,” wrote Hal Erickson in Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949 through 1993. “But the animation, though considerably better than Oriolo’s previous Felix the Cat, was less than Olympian. Nor were the storylines particularly Homeric, since they existed only as slender pegs on which to hang the wearisome hero-villain confrontations.”
“American singer Johnny Nash, best known later as the singer and composer of the massive 1970s pop hit I Can See Clearly Now, warbled the considerably inferior and rather overtly boastful title song on the soundtrack at the beginning and end,” noted David Perlmutter in The Encyclopedia of American Animated Television Shows.
The Mighty Hercules was featured in a board game, a record album, and two issues of a Gold Key comic book. You could also buy his glow-in-the-dark magic ring, complete with a secret compartment, for a quite reasonable 25 cents.
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