A good day to remember the profound care Disney poured into Atlantis.
Let's talk about The Creation of Atlantean. 🌊
To build the world, Disney hired Mark Okrand, the linguist who also created the famous Klingon and Vulcan for the Star Trek series.
Okrand created a fully functional, learnable language. He designed it under the narrative premise that Atlantean was a "root dialect" or a "Tower of Babel" language, the ultimate mother tongue from which all human languages evolved. To achieve this ancient, foundational sound, Okrand primarily utilized Proto-Indo-European roots.
The actual visual characters (the glyphs) were created by comic book artist Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy. Mignola designed the unique script shown on the chart.
In the lore of the film, the language is written in a system called 'boustrophedon', meaning it is read from left to right on the first line, right to left on the second line, and continues alternating back and forth, mimicking the movement of an ox plowing a field.
When you eat Mexican food, your brain releases endorphins and dopamine. Capsaicin, the compound in chili peppers, binds to pain receptors in your mouth. Your brain reads this as a threat and counters with feel-good chemicals. The burn in a good salsa triggers the same pathway as a runner's high.
This is all happening on top of a food tradition more than 3,000 years in the making. The tortilla in a chicharron taco exists because of nixtamalization, a process Mesoamerican cooks developed roughly 3,200 years ago. Corn kernels are soaked in lime water, which releases niacin, a B vitamin that corn otherwise locks away in an indigestible form. Without this step, corn-heavy diets cause pellagra, a B-vitamin deficiency that killed around 7,000 Americans per year at its peak in the early 20th century. Southern sharecroppers were eating corn without the process Mexico had preserved for three millennia.
In 2010, the UN added Mexican cuisine to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, the first year any national food culture had ever qualified. The application covered seed preservation, farming customs, ritual preparation, and thousands of years of cooking knowledge passed through communities.
The diversity inside that designation is hard to picture. Mexico has 59 varieties of heirloom corn, more than 60 distinct chili pepper types, and 32 states with cuisines different enough that Oaxacan mole negro (a dark sauce from dried chili and chocolate) and Yucatecan cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork in a smoky red spice paste) share almost no ingredients. Oaxaca alone has more than 20 types of mole. Mole poblano uses more than 20 ingredients, including several chili varieties, dark chocolate, and cinnamon, in a single sauce.
Chicharron fires three systems at once. Fat carries flavor deep into the palate. The crunch comes from pork skin dried, then dropped in 375-degree oil. The trapped moisture turns to steam, puffs the skin, and produces thousands of flavor compounds through the same browning chemistry that makes coffee and seared meat smell incredible. Then the salsa lands capsaicin on top of everything and the dopamine kicks in.
The "best food ever" reaction has a chemical basis. You are tasting dopamine from capsaicin, browning chemistry from pork fat at high heat, and a tortilla built on a process 3,200 years old. These flavors were engineered to do exactly this.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the thrilling conclusion of the FFVII Remake Series, launches simultaneously on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S, Epic Games Store and Steam in Spring 2027.