If you spent any time around VHS tapes in the late ’90s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the cover for Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus.
It looks exactly like what you would expect from that era: a direct-to-video animated movie released in January 1998, built around two popular syndicated TV shows, with Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless reprising their roles from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. On the surface, it feels like the kind of quick franchise spinoff that used to end up in rental stores, bargain bins, and, eventually, thrift shops.
But this particular VHS tape is more interesting than its packaging suggests.
Behind this forgotten animated crossover was a surprising group of artists connected to some of the most influential cartoons of the 1990s and early 2000s, including The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Regular Show.
In other words, Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie was not just a random TV tie-in. It was quietly made by people who helped shape a major era of American animation.
The Director Had Serious Animation Credentials
The movie was directed and produced by Lynne Naylor, a name casual viewers may not immediately recognize, but one that animation fans should know.
Naylor was one of the co-founders of Spümcø, the studio behind The Ren & Stimpy Show. That show became one of the most visually distinct and influential cartoons of the early 1990s, helping push TV animation into stranger, bolder, and more exaggerated territory.
Naylor’s career also included work on Tiny Toon Adventures, Batman: The Animated Series, The Powerpuff Girls, SpongeBob SquarePants, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, and later DreamWorks’ The Mighty Ones, which she co-created.
That background matters because Hercules and Xena does not look like a generic direct-to-video cartoon once you actually pay attention to it. The designs are broad and muscular. The faces are expressive. The action has a rougher, stranger energy than the box art would lead you to expect.
It is not trying to look like Disney’s Hercules. It belongs to a different animation family tree entirely.
The Storyboard Team Is the Real Surprise
The most interesting part of the movie may be its storyboard department.
Storyboard artists help shape how an animated movie actually plays on screen: the staging, the camera angles, the expressions, the physical comedy, the rhythm of the action. They are not just illustrating a script. In animation, they are often building much of the movie’s visual personality.
And the storyboard team on Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie included several names that became important in animation and comics.
Charlie Bean would go on to work on shows like Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, I Am Weasel, and Cow and Chicken. He later co-directed Tron: Uprising and The Lego Ninjago Movie.
Chris Reccardi, who was married to Lynne Naylor, had an enormous animation résumé of his own. His work touched The Ren & Stimpy Show, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Regular Show. He died in 2019, but his design influence continues to be felt in modern animation.
Other storyboard names connected to the movie include Stephen DeStefano, Mike Kim, Scott Morse, and Carey Yost — artists whose work would also connect to the larger wave of bold, creator-driven animation that defined the late 1990s and early 2000s.
That is what makes the movie such a strange little time capsule. In 1998, many of these artists were not yet famous to general audiences. They were working artists taking the jobs available to them. But looking back now, the credits are surprisingly loaded.
No, It Wasn’t a Cartoon Network Movie
To be clear, Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie was not produced by Cartoon Network.
The movie was made by Universal Cartoon Studios in partnership with Renaissance Pictures, the company associated with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert’s live-action Hercules and Xena shows. It was released direct-to-video and later aired on Fox Kids.
But the Cartoon Network comparison still makes sense in one specific way: the creative overlap.
A number of the artists involved in Hercules and Xena either had connections to influential animation studios of the era or would soon become part of the creative world that shaped shows like The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, and other Cartoon Network favorites.
That makes the film feel like a bridge between animation eras. It has one foot in the weird, exaggerated world of Ren & Stimpy. It has another foot in the bold, graphic, action-driven style that would help define Cartoon Network’s golden age.
And somehow, all of that passed through a direct-to-video Hercules and Xena cartoon.
It Arrived Right After Disney’s Hercules
The timing also makes the movie easy to misunderstand.
Disney’s Hercules opened in theaters in 1997. It was colorful, musical, polished, and very much part of the Disney Renaissance machine, even if it did not perform as strongly as some of Disney’s biggest hits from that period.
Then, just months later, Universal released Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie on video.
On paper, that sounds like a quick attempt to ride Disney’s wave. But the two movies are almost nothing alike.
Disney’s Hercules is a Broadway-style mythological comedy with Alan Menken songs, celebrity voices, and a gospel-inspired Greek chorus. Universal’s Hercules and Xena is stranger, smaller, rougher, and more tied to the pulpy fantasy-adventure world of the TV shows.
It has Kevin Sorbo as Hercules. It has Lucy Lawless as Xena. It has Michael Hurst as Iolaus, Renee O’Connor as Gabrielle, Alexandra Tydings as Aphrodite, Ted Raimi as Crius, and Kevin Smith — the late New Zealand actor, not the filmmaker — as Ares.
It also has Lucy Lawless singing, gods and Titans fighting, and the kind of Saturday-morning action energy that feels very different from Disney’s polished musical approach.
Why Has It Been Forgotten?
The simplest reason is that it was direct-to-video.
That meant no major theatrical campaign, no big opening weekend, no major awards conversation, and no lasting cultural moment outside the existing Hercules and Xena fanbase.
The movie also suffered from the way direct-to-video animation was often treated in the 1990s. Even when talented people worked on those projects, the packaging could make them look disposable. If a movie looked cheap on the outside, many viewers assumed it was cheap all the way through.
There is also the fact that Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess are not as visible now as they once were. Both shows were major parts of 1990s syndicated television, but they do not currently dominate streaming culture the way some other nostalgic franchises do. Younger viewers are less likely to stumble across them naturally.
So the animated movie ended up stuck in an odd place. It was too tied to the TV shows to become a standalone animated classic, too direct-to-video to be treated like a major release, and too early for the internet to immediately notice how many future animation heavyweights were involved.
It Deserves a Second Look
Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus is not secretly a lost Disney masterpiece. It is still a late-’90s direct-to-video cartoon, and it carries some of the limitations that come with that.
But it is much more interesting than its reputation suggests.
It was directed by Lynne Naylor, an artist with deep ties to some of the most influential animation of her generation. Its storyboard team included artists who helped shape the look and feel of American TV animation in the years that followed. And it stands at a strange crossroads between syndicated fantasy television, Universal’s direct-to-video animation, the influence of Ren & Stimpy, and the coming wave of Cartoon Network-style cartoons.
That is a lot of history hiding behind one dusty VHS cover.
For most people, Hercules and Xena — The Animated Movie probably looked like just another forgotten franchise spinoff.
But the credits tell a better story.
This was a bargain-bin cartoon with a surprisingly impressive creative bloodline — and more than 25 years later, that might be the most interesting thing about it.
