Previously, we brought you exclusive details about a planned sequel to Disney’s underrated animated adventure Atlantis: The Lost Empire from director Kirk Wise. And, yes, we should pause to note that there was a direct-to-video follow-up to Atlantis entitled Atlantis: Milo’s Return, but that it wasn’t designed as a sequel but was rather the first three episodes of a canceled television project that were awkwardly stitched together and were created without the involvement of the movie’s team.

Wise revealed that the sequel, which was very much in development, would have climaxed with the reveal that the evil, masked villain was none other than Helga Sinclair (voiced by Claudia Christian), one of the original team members from the first film. In the past week, we’ve been able to chat with director Gary Trousdale, producer Don Hahn and story supervisor John Sanford, who have illuminated even more of what this really-for-real sequel was going to be like.

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Image via Disney

“It's something you always think about on all the movies and sometimes it’s like, ‘Well there will never be a sequel to this.’ But I think in the case of Atlantis it made some sense to say, ‘Gee if this for some reason hits, it’d be nice to have something in our pocket to have a continuing story.’ Because it’s the kind of thing that lends itself to a continuing story,” Hahn explained. “We never wrote it or anything or really pitched anything. But it was something in the back of our mind that we spent a couple of days working on.”

According to Sanford, the movie was going to be set in the 1950s. “We figured we were done with Nazis,” Sanford said. “So we put it in the 50s to get that out of the way, which incidentally would have put us ahead of Indiana Jones 4.” And, since the surviving crewmembers of the Ulysses are now wearing their magical Atlantean necklaces, they wouldn’t have aged a day.

The sequel even had a working title – Let’s Get Milo. “Because the crew was going to go and theoretically rescue Milo from this other team that was coming to invade Atlantis,” Sanford explained. “At the time, on HBO, they were playing a movie called Let’s Get Harry. It was a movie about a bunch of friends about a pal who gets caught up in some drug deal in Vietnam.” Another proposed title, written on an outline, was simply Return to Atlantis.

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Image via Disney

The opening sequence of Let’s Get Milo saw a nuclear submarine confront the Leviathan, the giant mechanical guardian of Atlantis that quickly dispatched the crewmembers’ ship, the Ulysses, in the first movie. Only this time, the nuclear submarine kills the Leviathan. “We open with the Leviathan getting blown apart by this nuclear sub and this bad person on the bridge, which turns out to be cybernetically-enhanced Helga,” Sanford said. Whoa.

Not only would this opening sequence establish the stakes for the new movie, but it would also set-up the tone that Sanford and the team were going for. “My vision was that we’d play a lot of the same beats, but we’d flip it on the head,” Sanford said. “So when Atlantis 2 comes up, the audience is like, ‘Oh no, they’re going to go raid Atlantis, and they’re not going to be able to stop them because this crew successfully defeated Leviathan.’ That was the dramatic question I wanted to open with.”

And much of the drama of the Atlantis sequel would focus on this conflict.

“I do kind of remember,” Trousdale said of the sequel plans. “There was a was a race – one team wanted to warn and help and the other wanted to dominate and destroy, in the words of the President these days.”

To Trousdale, the most intriguing aspect was bringing back the villainous Helga in even-more-villainous form.

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Image via Disney

“I do remember the idea, because we had said, ‘You never saw Helga’s body. She could have gotten away.’ Some of the debris that was coming down was Rourke’s crystallized body,” Trousdale said. “Who knows how that could have helped.” The team even began developing her new, cybernetic look. “Like half of her head is gone and I don’t know if we’d talked to [designer Mike] Mignola about it but definitely had plans for it,” Trousdale said. “Is it metal? Is it stone? What is she made of now? It was fun. But very short lived.”

For Hahn, the sequel was a way of keeping the creative team that made the original Atlantis so exciting, together for a little while longer. “We had a great time,” Hahn said. “The crew and the collaboration and the people we were working with, whether it’s Kirk or Gary or people like John Sanford or Mike Mignola, it was a really positive experience. So in a work environment, as a producer, you’re just wondering how to keep that experience going. Why blow it apart? That was it for me – trying to keep that team together.”

But like the crew of the Ulysses, not everybody made it. Plans for a proper Atlantis: The Lost Empire sequel, and an Atlantis TV series and several Atlantis theme park attractions, evaporated after a lackluster opening weekend. And the movie would ultimately be the last Walt Disney Animation feature for Trousdale, Wise and Hahn. (Sanford would eventually co-direct the troubled Home on the Range.) But as Disney+ has resurrected franchises like The Mighty Ducks as streaming television series, why couldn’t the service develop an all-new animated sequel to a beloved classic? Who is ready to go back to Atlantis? Let’s get Milo!