10 Disturbing Backstories Behind Your Favourite Movie Characters

8. Zeus Tricked Hercules' Mother Into Conceiving Him

It's no secret that Disney has a habit of taking classic mythological stories and fairytales and sanitising them for younger audiences, though in the case of their 1997 animation Hercules, they really had to do some cleaning up to make the original Greek myth palatable for the tots.

You see, the original myth of Hercules' - or rather Heracles, as he was then known - conception saw Zeus visit his own great-granddaughter Alcmene disguised as her husband Alcmene. The two spent three whole days rutting, producing Hercules in the process.

Now, a very charitable reading of this would say that Zeus "seduced" Alcmene, but this is quite obviously a case of rape-by-deception: he assumed the identity of her husband in order to get into her pants, and to make matters worse, made her son a product of rape.

This was of course entirely reworked for the animation: Zeus and Hera were a happily married couple who conceived Zeus, while Alcmene became his adoptive mother and, er, there's no rape in sight.

For the tone and audience they were shooting for, it was certainly a necessary change.