Please enjoy the third in a new five-part series from guest author Henrik M. – Ed
It feels almost quaint to look back at the past 20 years and see just how drastically and quickly the entertainment landscape changed. In 2000, everything had its own little niche. Sure, video games and the Internet were already there, and showing signs of their future dominance of our lives, but there was no Netflix, no YouTube, and television was still the great, unquestionable overlord of media. Unfortunately, it was during these early days of the 21st century that the inherent flaws of network TV cost us five classic animated shows. In this five-part series, I’ll be taking a look at several short-lived gems of animation lost to us for a variety of factors, the biggest of which being that ratings-based television was a dying dinosaur 20 years ago, and hasn’t gotten any livelier in the interim.
With the untimely demise of both Mission Hill and Downtown, along with the cancellation of Daria and Celebrity Deathmatch in 2002, there were slim pickings for adult animation in the early years of the 2000s, leaving viewers with little other than South Park and the increasingly tragicomic parody of itself that The Simpsons had turned into. However, a new generation of animation fans were just starting to make a name for themselves, and two of these were the creative team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. While it’s unlikely that you’re familiar with any of their early work, you will almost certainly know of their later successes, including Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (a byzantine process that took damn near four years just to get a proper script finished), 21 Jump Street, and eventually the surprise hit The Lego Movie. They also got fired off the Star Wars spin-off Solo, but that’s a story for another day. Or not, it’s really not that complicated.
However, long before they were absorbed into the mainstream Hollywood scene, the two had a dream, a dream dating back to their college days. A dream about sexy teenage clones for some reason! This is the story of Clone High!
Clone High, or Clone High USA as it’s known in some markets, was originally conceived while Lord and Miller attended Dartmouth College in the ’90s as a parody of the teen dramas like Dawson’s Creek and Beverly Hills 90210, which were impossible to escape during that decade. While the show parodied the regular cliches of teen high school dramas, the twist of the show was that all the characters were teenaged clones of historical figures, the products of a poorly conceived secret government program back in the 1980s. A group of shadowy government and military officials recruited the brilliant but deranged Dr. Scudworth, as well as his robotic butler Mr. Butlertron, to steal the remains of various historical (as well as a handful of more contemporary) leaders and celebrities, such as John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley, and use their DNA to create clones that would help them take over the world… somehow. Their actual plan is never spelled out in any real detail. The project hit a little snag when the group realized that while they COULD make clones from the DNA, they weren’t actually the same people as the originals, they were just a bunch of fetuses with famous genetics. The clone babies were adopted out to the families of a small town, and eventually put in school together with the intent of having them mature into the same persons as their originals so the government could harness their abilities. Part of the show’s humor comes from the way many of the clones are wildly different than their “parents,” often as a direct result of snapping under the pressure of trying to live up to their heritage. The project is also complicated by Dr. Scudworth, now the acting principal of Clone High, who intends to steal the clones from the government and use them to open up a theme park called “Cloney Island.”
Really, if you hire someone named “Cinnamon”, you deserve what you get.
Owing to the fact that it just plain never aired here as far as I’ve been able to figure out, I never saw Clone High during its original 2002 run. I didn’t even become aware of it until the same period of Internet trawling in 2010 that led to me rediscovering Downtown while laid up from a back injury. Like most people growing up in the ’90s, I had been forced to endure the glut of teen dramas that you’d have to hide in a bunker to avoid, and even then, I’m pretty sure the douchebags from Dawson’s Creek would have found me. While many of you reading this might be too young to have seen Dawson’s Creek, you might be familiar with more recent shows like The O.C. or The Hills, and will remember the shallow characters and petty relationship squabbles that characterize shows of this type. Relationship drama, reinforcing high school clique cliches that were dated 30 years ago, and the endless crappy new wave pop soundtracks haunted my teenage years. As such, Clone High‘s merciless skewering of their boring cliches really spoke to me, and would almost certainly have had an even bigger impact on me had I seen it in its original run when Beverly Hill‘s reign of terror was still fresh in my mind.
After Fox passed on the show in the late 90’s, Clone High was officially picked up by MTV in 2002, and finally premiered on November 2. The show featured a running gag where every single episode was a Very Special Episode in the style of the sitcoms in the ’80s, when producers wanted to make a clumsy attempt at addressing drugs or death or whatever but would end up with them hopelessly crippled by the Orwellian broadcast standards of the era. Unlike those shows, however, Clone High simply parodied the hell out of those half-assed attempts at social commentary by showing how overblown and overdramatic they tended to be. This is most notable in “ADD: The Last D Is For Disorder,” which made fun of AIDS awareness specials, and “Litter Kills Literally”, which parodied shows killing off characters just to drum up publicity while tacking on some extra social commentary to make it seem less cheap.
We’ll start with a look at the cast. The show centers on Abe, the clone of legendary U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Abe completely lacks Lincoln’s famous ability to inspire and lead, and thus finds himself shunted to the fringes of the high school social ladder. There, he’s joined by his best friend Gandhi, the clone of Indian civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi, and Joan, the clone of French warrior saint Joan of Arc. As mentioned above, a large part of the show’s humor was that while most of the clones at least superficially resembled their originals, or pop culture’s view of them anyway, they often lacked one or two vital aspects that made them fall well short of what they were trying to live up to. However, this didn’t apply to the main characters, who didn’t even get that much. Abe is shown as passive, neurotic and clumsy, and desperately wants to fit in rather than lead himself (one episode implies that this might be partially caused by the brutal death of the original Lincoln). Gandhi actually outright states that he snapped under the pressure of trying to live up to the legacy of the original Gandhi, and ended up devolving into a wannabe party animal–a role he can’t even fulfill, as he’s even more unpopular than Abe. Finally, Joan struggles with the religious aspects of her predecessor, who claimed to have been divinely ordained by God to lead the French. Unlike the original Joan of Arc, who began having religious visions at 14, she feels a lack of purpose and connection to her original, and has regressed into a kind of cliche, sarcastic goth girl stereotype. However, when she finally DOES begin to hear the voice of God in one episode (or so she thought, it was actually the transmission from a Christian radio station she was picking up with her dented retainer), rather than becoming a strong leader, she ends up devolving into a crazy street preacher because the voices never actually STOP, preventing her from getting any sleep. Another major part of the overarching plot was that Joan nursed a huge romantic interest in Abe, but the series took this overdone cliche even further than most similar shows and had Abe’s obliviousness to her crush reach such cartoonish levels that it almost makes it seem like he’s desperately trying to avoid acknowledging it, rather than acting out of genuine ignorance. This romantic tumor of a subplot isn’t even resolved by the end of the series, which ended on a cliffhanger in the finale.
Ahh, awkward teenage lust, the bottomless well of TV show drama.
Outside of the main three, the show also featured a secondary main cast: JFK and Cleo, the most popular kids in school, and the aforementioned Dr. Scudworth and Mr. Butlertron. JFK, originally introduced as the resident jock bully, a role he slowly grows out of as the show progresses, is the clone of President John F. Kennedy. Unlike his foil Abe, JFK actually does superficially resemble the original Kennedy, in the sense that he’s a rich, womanizing asshole, but unfortunately lacks all of Kennedy’s redeeming features, and for some reason had assumed that the original was a “macho womanizing stud who conquered the moon.” Cleo, the clone of Cleopatra, fills the role of your standard alpha bitch cheerleader, but like JFK, undergoes at least some character development over the course of the show, and is shown as slightly less of a stereotype by the end. She also serves as the romantic foil for Joan, as she’s the target of Abe’s feelings, resulting in a bizarre kind of romantic… dodecahedron? Is that a fitting shape? I don’t know, some sort of geometric shape, anyway. Abe likes Cleo, who likes Abe but also JFK, while Joan likes Abe, and JFK likes Cleo (and anyone else who drifts too close, including Joan). Abe and Cleo start dating officially about halfway through the series, but the show never drops the ‘will they, won’t they’ dynamic, which comes crashing down in the two-part finale.
Finally, Dr. Scudworth and Mr. Butlertron often work on the fringes of the teens’ hijinks, and are usually involved with separate plots dealing with the Shadowy Figures and other stories not related to the school. One story in particular is especially bizarre, as it doesn’t interact with the other characters at all, and revolves around Scudworth’s battle with a pesky cartoon skunk named Skunky Poo who keeps interrupting his evil experiments. This segment, appearing in “Plane Crazy: Gate Expectations,” is a parody of the infamous Screwy Squirrel cartoons by Tex Avery, which were notable because the main character wasn’t a karmic prankster like Bugs Bunny, but just a destructive asshole, which describes Skunky Poo pretty well. For added comedy, Scudworth isn’t immune to the damage caused by your typical Looney Tunes cartoonish violence, and is on the receiving end of several bloody, gruesome injuries from things like dynamite and anvils. Other aspects of Dr. Scudworth includes his high-school rivalry with Full House-star John Stamos, which becomes a plot point in the finale, and his incompetent attempts at hiding his “Cloney Island” plans from the Shadowy Figures–among other things, he just leaves a scale model of the park lying around in plain view, complete with a sign saying “Dr. Scudworth’s Evil Plan.” He’s… he’s just not very good at scheming, is probably the underlying theme here.
Outside of the main characters, the cast is supplemented by dozens of other teenage clones with varying degrees of importance. Most are just used as one-off gags or background characters, such as the clone of Napoleon Bonaparte (who’s just as short and bad-tempered as his predecessor) or the clone of Buddha (notably NOT Gautama Buddha, who was Indian, but the bald Chinese monk Budai, who you’d probably recognize from the iconic zen Buddha statues). A handful of other clones have more prominent roles, such as Julius Caesar, who is one of the popular kids and is usually seen hanging out with JFK, and Marie Curie, who’s horrifically mutated due to the damage the original Curie did to her DNA with her radiation research but is a successful member of the dance club thanks to the perfect balance her deformed skull gives her. Outside of the school, the show also featured the clones’ adoptive parents, with the most entertaining being Toots, Joan’s adoptive father, a blind and mildly senile former jazz player who doesn’t seem to realize his own impairment and gets into trouble, Mr. Magoo-style. JFK was raised by two homosexual men (who he always refers to dually as “gay foster dads”), while Cleo’s mother is an alcoholic former cheerleader, giving her a rather unpleasant glimpse into her future.
Oh, and this is Abe’s dad. Tellingly, they didn’t even bother naming him.
As mentioned above, the show took a lot of shots at the Very Special Episode format of sitcoms and teen shows. In “ADD: The Last D Is for Disorder,” Gandhi is diagnosed with ADD, which the characters apparently mistake for AIDS, leading to a panic-induced witch hunt by the parents who don’t want him to “infect” their kids. The episode goes out of its way to really hit all the cliches, right down to featuring a celebrity guest whose sole purpose is to educate the characters on whatever the problem is; in this case it’s Tom Green, who also has ADD. Unfortunately, he’s also Tom Green, and gets distracted by a plastic bag and runs off before he can finish delivering the lesson. The situation doesn’t get fixed until Abe kisses Gandhi, changing everyone’s minds. Not because they understand ADD, but because they decide that their discomfort over two men kissing is stronger than their fear of ADD, so they decide to accept Gandhi and shun Abe instead.
It’s an American small town, you take your victories where you can.
There was also “Litter Kills Literally,” which parodied the “kill off a character” special episode, which usually just killed a minor character no one gave a shit about in the first place until suddenly he was everyone’s best friend in that particular episode, or a character that had just been introduced just for this purpose. This episode took this even further, introducing Poncey, the clone of Spanish explorer Ponce De Leon, whose main claim to fame was his failed quest for the Fountain of Youth. This was his first episode, even though everyone acts like they’ve known him for years, and he is supposedly JFK’s best friend. The episode combines the character murder with the trope of being “informative” about something even a first-grader would know is bad, such as drugs or the bad kind of touching, yet treats it with absolute seriousness. I’m of course talking about the teen scourge of littering, which is shown as something teens are super into, because all the cool kids throw their crap on the ground rather than in their proper disposal bins. This leads to Poncey’s comically Rasputinian death as he’s killed by his own litter just seconds after having a huge falling out with JFK to add some extra drama. The rest of the episode deals with Poncey’s funeral, which is for some reason held at the school, JFK and the others coming to terms with his death, and everyone realizing that littering isn’t cool. The whole thing is played so seriously it actually makes it even funnier.
Another episode that deserves special mention is “Film Fest: Tears Of a Clone.” Clone High wins a track and field competition against another school, which leads to a destructive riot that destroys most of the school (hilariously incited by Buddha to show support for the home team). Rather than, you know, punishing anyone involved, the faculty decides that what the kids really need is a way to express all their teenage angst and feelings, and Abe volunteers to organize a film festival for the students to submit their work to. The episode parodies both bad cliche film plots, as most of the films are less about art and more about poorly copying blockbuster cinema, as well as the well meaning but naive trend of thinking that teenage crime is caused by lack of expression or understanding rather than that sometimes kids are just dicks. The films the characters make aren’t exactly Scorsese material either. Abe’s film is basically just Air Bud with a giraffe playing football because there’s no rule saying that it can’t (the opposing team is literally called The Bad Guys, for God’s sake). Gandhi makes a typical buddy cop movie called Black and Tan and enlists a hapless George Washington Carver to be his partner. Joan makes an incredibly abstract surrealist film about her love for Abe (luckily for her, only Sigmund Freud’s clone understands it). Most of the other films are destroyed when Thomas Edison’s clone’s coal-powered projector catches fire, and the festival ends with ANOTHER riot, incited by accident by Abe when he calls for cheers for the festival’s success.
An omen, I’m sure.
Thanks to the show’s connection with MTV, it was able to make liberal use of celebrity special guests voicing themselves (and in one memorable one-scene wonder, Michael J. Fox having a single line as Gandhi’s remaining kidney). As I mentioned before, the show featured Tom Green, but also stars such as Marilyn Manson (“Election Blu-Galoo”), Mandy Moore (“Snowflake Day”), Ashley Angel (“Gate Expectations”), and John Stamos (“The Season Finale”). It also featured a pre-fame Zach Braff and a post-fame Andy Dick in a handful of minor roles such as Paul Revere and Vincent Van Gogh. The season finale went with this and implied that the various celebrity guests had some sort of connection to the Shadowy Figures and their plans for the teen clones, but as the show was cancelled, this was never elaborated upon.
The series concluded with the two parter “Makeover Makeover Makeover: The Makeover Episode” and “Changes: The Big Prom: The Sex Romp: The Season Finale”, which focused on the winter prom, originally a leftover concept for a running gag for the show which would have featured several prom episodes a season to parody the incredibly overdone prom plots in teen media. The prom, held in the meat locker of the local slaughterhouse because someone scuffed the floors in the gym with black sneakers, is a night of expectations for the cast: Joan hopes to finally tell Abe her feelings, Abe hopes to finally hook up with Cleo, and Gandhi hopes to… well, get any attention from girls whatsoever. Meanwhile, Dr. Scudworth has his annual breakdown over prom season due to the trauma he suffered from losing Prom King to John Stamos back in high school, and with Mr. Butlertron’s help, intends to rig the Prom King election so he can finally win the crown for himself. Unbeknownst to him, the Shadowy Figures have finally had enough of Scudworth’s incompetence and poorly disguised scheming, and intend to confiscate the clones on prom night. And unfortunately, you won’t find out how any of that turned out, because the climax of the final episode involves every single character on the show except Scudworth and Butlertron frozen solid inside the meat locker, just as Abe realizes his own feelings for Joan and is about to tell her, only to find her in bed with JFK. And that was the last we saw of them, 15 years ago. Not the best closure I’ve ever gotten.
The frozen cow corpses do sort of take away some of the drama.
So, how did MTV manage to screw this up, then? Well, for once it wasn’t MTV’s fault–not entirely, anyway. The truth is much, much dumber than the standard network machinations. In early 2003, an article in Maxim Magazine had featured an image of the actual Mahatma Gandhi getting beaten up, which generated a shitstorm in India, where Gandhi is kind of a big deal. And unfortunately for Clone High, the show got caught up in said shitstorm when outraged Indians came across the show while searching for info about the Maxim image, and weren’t exactly thrilled about Gandhi being portrayed as a desperate, unpopular loser. The outcry reached the point that MTV was threatened with losing its Indian broadcast license if the show wasn’t pulled. While the creators were asked to pitch a possible second season where it was revealed that Gandhi was actually the clone of Gary Coleman the entire time, this didn’t work out, and Clone High was abruptly cancelled in March 2003, left to fester in obscurity. It might have stayed there had the show not gained further popularity on reruns on Canadian animation network Teletoon and MTV2, which if nothing else led to a DVD release of the series. Lord and Miller have also been talking about a possible Clone High movie since 2014, so a return to Clone High is not entirely impossible. At least, not as impossible as bringing back Downtown, which MTV appears to have hidden in that one landfill with all the E.T. games.
In part four of our series, we’ll be looking at yet ANOTHER cartoon series MTV screwed over, though this time we’ll be moving on from high school to college, as we take a look at Pete William’s Undergrads!
-Henrik M.