Atlantis: The Lost Empire

After The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise wanted, in Wise’s words, an Adventureland movie instead of a Fantasyland one, and took the look from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. Mignola supplied character designs, temples and story ideas; his sketch of a blind stone flying fish shooting lightning grew into the climax. It was drawn for CinemaScope width. Executives worried about paper size, since the format had added to the cost of Sleeping Beauty and The Black Cauldron, and the fix was to draw characters and backgrounds smaller. Marc Okrand, who devised most of the Klingon dialogue in the Star Trek films, built Atlantean on an Indo-European base and made the tapes Leonard Nimoy used to learn the king’s lines. Gunplay was scaled back after Columbine, and John Sanford got a Viking prologue that by his reckoning had cost five million dollars replaced with the fall of Atlantis. When it underperformed, a planned series was cancelled and its first three episodes became the direct to video Atlantis: Milo’s Return. A good fit if you accept a shortened journey and trimmed monster encounters in return for wide views of the city. Not for anyone wanting musical numbers or a cute animal sidekick; Milo’s pet rat Plato was cut partly for fitting that mould too closely.