Shooting Star is a song originally written for the 1997 Disney film Hercules by song writers Alan Menkin and David Zippel, and was conceived as the young Hercules' solo in that film.

However while a full orchestral demo recording was made, with the singing voice of the younger Hercules, Roger Bart, who had sung the song and had moved Menkin to tears during his audition for the film, providing his vocals for the completed version of the song, ultimately Shooting Star was cut from the film by the songwriters as they believed that, due to the style of music for Hercules shifting to gospel that the song felt “too wistful, with not enough drive” and that it made Hercules seem too soft, and decided they wanted to emphasise the “muscularity of his journey”. As a result of Bart’s solo being cut from the film, Menkin and Zippel wrote an entirely new song for the actor to sing, with Bart recalling that he was “thrilled and flabbergasted and grateful” when he discovered his original solo had been cut and that Menkin and Zippel had decided to write a new song for him. The song that would go on to replace Shooting Star would become Go the Distance, however Shooting Star would end up seeing the light of day, as the Irish boyband Boyzone would make a cover of the song, which would not only peak at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart in 1997 but would also become the most common and well known version of the song.

At the 2017 D23 for a panel entitled Zero to Hero: The making of Hercules, a panel made to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, the full demo recording and the accompanying sketch storyboard made for the song was shown in public for the first time, allowing the original version of Shooting Star to finally be shown in it’s entirety.