The Amazing Feats of Young Hercules/Young Pocahontas

Amazon.com

These films epitomize the bargain-basement schlock that gives cartoons and children's entertainment a bad name. When Hercules is assigned a mere four labors as punishment for recklessly hurling thunderbolts, he's joined by Falina, a princess who's been turned into a sable. She tries to be comic but is merely obnoxious. Hercules defeats the Stymphalian birds, which are drawn as robots, and the Hydra, a clumsy three-headed dragon. He also tangles with a Gorgon (borrowed from the legend of Perseus) and goes after some golden apples. The result is a pointless bore, despite the ham- handed moralizing at the end.

Pocahontas fares no better. A conventional Indian girl, she wants to befriend a very silly John Smith, but the nasty medicine man insists all outsiders are evil. The songs by Megan Cavallari and David Goldsmith barely qualify as doggerel: "Look out, strangers, for the Medicine Man / I'm on the warpath and I have a plan." In both films, the animation veers between painfully inept and unintentionally comic.

This DVD offers parents an effective new tool for curbing their kids' media intake: given the choice between watching it or no TV at all, most kids will opt for the latter. --Charles Solomon

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