Stebaer4 Yes It was this very cartoon of which had sparked my enthusiasm for Greco-Roman Mythology.I was first acquainted with this cartoon by watching it on both Saturday and Sunday Mornings on Boomtown of which is a Classic Little Kids Cowboy Show seen on Boston Television and lasted for so many years.It Starred The Cowboy named Rex Trailer.Johnny Nash sings the theme song well too.It's catchy for nostalgia's sake too. So each time in a classroom when Greco-Roman Mythology was covered I was the one to participate the most of anyone in the class.When I first heard The Story of Daedelus and his Son Icarus it reminded me of The Daedelus in the Cartoon of whom looked nothing like this one.Truthfully, Stephen "Steve" G. Baer a.k.a. "Ste" of Framingham,Ma.USA

MartinHafer Hanna-Barbera Productions must have loved this show. That's because it was so badly written and so amateurishly made that it made the worst Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1960s look very impressive by comparison! This terrible mess must in fact be the very lousiest cartoon series ever made. The characters are a lot like those in Clutch Cargo, in that often their bodies didn't move at all but the lips were animated. The animators also often used a few cartoon sketches again and again and again for the entire cartoon! A slide show would have been about as convincing as animation! Imagine the horror, then, that the quality of animation was not the major problem with the series! It was the stories themselves that were pure garbage. Each episode only lasted about 4 or 5 minutes and the plots often made no sense at all! And, for those who know anything about Greek mythology at all, the characters bore no resemblance to the original stories! In this cartoon's case, Hercules pops in and out of Olympus at will and owes everything to a magic ring. Hmmm,...this sounds a lot like Captain Marvel, not Hercules! And to top it off, the dialog was grade-Z! Herc's sidekick was a seemingly brain damaged creature named Newton who kept repeating EVERY line! I just wanted to shut him up so badly when I was a kid! A couple years ago, I noticed that our cable company offered some free cartoons ON DEMAND. I found that many of these Hercules cartoons were included and they were even worse than I remembered them from my childhood! They were so bad that I showed them to my daughter and we both laughed our heads off at the ineptness of the show. Only watch these for laugh value or to torture your kids if they have been bad--REAL, REAL bad!By the way, for more about the series as well as a review from someone who pretty much agrees with me, try http://www.toonopedia.com/m-herc.htm.

ace-150 So, a few years back, I was watching an Hercules-movie-a-thon on AMC before they became totally crappy. In between films (and, yes, Mickey Hargitay is my favorite) they showed AMC cultural filler. At one point, I was suddenly gobsmacked by the theme song from The Mighty Hercules, a 1963 cartoon offering which I watched regularly. You know, the one with the lyrics, "softness in his eyes, iron in his thighs." The one where Daedalus, the villain, has a big, fluffy cat. Where Hercules transform by the power of his jewelry. The one where Herc can't spend time with his beard, I mean girlfriend Helena, because he's gallivanting around Greece with a gay, jailbait centaur with echolalia. At any rate, I had a very demanding physical reaction within seconds. I felt like Data meeting Dr. Soong. I found the source of my programming. How many members of my tribe have this show as their first erotic memory?

Jeope! The Greatest Cartoon You'll Never, Ever See Again. On Earth. Period."The Mighty Hercules" is a bygone animated classic, the likes of which are just not made today. With "Rocket Robin Hood" and "The Amazing Spider-Man", "Hercules" created a mighty trifecta of cartoon delights for the Gen-X set.I mean, damn. Come on. You gotta know what I mean here."Hercules" was one of countless shoestring-budget cartoon creations to appear on the Saturday morning scene in the 70s and 80s. And while the show's original run existed in the Mighty Sixties, its true essence revealed itself through rerun after jaw-dropping rerun. And just how cheap was this program?In one episode, Herc's nemesis, the conniving wizard Daedelus, gains control of a deadly flying dragon and instructs it to destroy Hercules. Out of the sky it spirals towards Herc, who runs headlong into battle...behind a giant rock. No fooling. The entire tussle takes place behind this rock. Now that's thrifty cartooning.That aside, "Hercules" did boast some cool and laugh-inducing characters and scenes, like the aforementioned Daedelus, quite possibly one of animation's most heinous individuals. With squinted, shifty eyes, a black cloak, little pointy slippers and a handlebar mustache of handlebar mustaches, Daedelus and his equally shifty feline, Dido, attempt dastardly deeds on what seems a daily basis. Occasionally the Mask Of Vulcan would appear. This hombre was pretty much a Daedelus clone with a janitor's pail on his head who was invincible so long as he wore it -- so when he showed up Herc would somehow have to get it off with a tree branch. Then there was Willimene, who essentially was a chick-Daedelus. She had a parrot and spent much of her time beating on Herc's maiden, Helena.But really, when dissecting "Hercules", one has to go no further than the sidekicks. Herc receives help in the form of Newton, a knock-kneed bumbling centaur with slight homosexual tendencies (and more than an inspiration for "The Simpsons" Waylon Smithers), and also Toot, a spritely sort of two-legged version of Newton who can only express himself through a piccolo. And speaking of cheap and careless cartoon-making, watch out for the one where Newton's voice changes mid-episode. This blatant disregard for quality and continuity may mark this program as, well, amateur...but in the spirit of kitsch and pop-culture, it's probably what puts "The Mighty Hercules" over the top as one of TV's true diamonds in the rough.Oh yeah, and a theme song for the ages. Absolutely kickass.