Rewatching Clone High
I already feel too old to be on TikTok — and one thing on the platform that makes me feel it is the massive amounts of soundbites used from the 2003 MTV animated series “Clone High.” As a preface I didn’t see Clone High when it was airing, I saw it uploaded to YouTube in 2006. The pervasiveness of this media in 2021 has reached a point where I’ve noticed that my roommate is able to quote from multiple episodes of the show despite never having seen it and not having TikTok.
It had been a number of years since I’ve seen the show so I decided to rewatch it alongside my two roommates, Chazz and Randy. Clone High is an animated teen dramedy that aired for one season in 2003. The premise is simple and explained through its “brilliantly emo” intro music. Paraphrasing the theme, “...back in the 1980s secret government employees dug up famous guys and ladies and made them using genetic copies.” The show then follows all the worst dialogue and story cliches from ’90s teen dramas in a high school populated by clones of historical figures.
These Clone High will take every chance it can get to remind you of the most embarrassing and saturated garbage plot devices that used to keep us on the edge of our seats.
The series fills our normal character tropes with a bumbling Abraham Lincoln and his two best friends, wild party animal Mahatma Gandhi, and the goth Joan of Arc. In addition is the high school jock, John F Kennedy, and the very popular Cleopatra. The story follows a very cliche best friend, Joan of Arc, desperately in love with the protagonist, Abe Lincoln, who is set on dating the most popular girl in school, Cleopatra, while facing off the challenges of not losing her to the jock, JFK.
The show is an incredible mix of brilliant parodying of ’90s teen dramas, character, and music (all originally scored for the show) — and covering all that brilliant is a lot of dick jokes, cringy moments, and an abundance of less than clever sexual euphemisms. Clone High does a few brilliant moves of meta-humor that I’d like to highlight from my re-watching.
Absence of Character Arcs.
Popular girls in teen dramas are more than often treated as objects — the storytelling of Clone High is more than aware of this and tries to make this fault the central aspects of Cleopatra’s parody of this trope. The effect is painfully self-aware. The characters in the show never learn any lessons either, they remain tropes from the minute they appear until the last moment you see them on screen; many characters are inserted for cheap plot devices as well.
Fact and Fiction
One of the too obvious pieces that seem to go unnoticed at first is the rivalry between underdog Abe Lincoln and popular jock JFK. This device becomes especially funny when we step back and remember they are both dead U.S presidents — it becomes even more absurd when they face off to be class president where Abe Lincoln is proven not to be a natural-born leader. Clone High takes advantage of our understanding of the real historical figures versus the character of their clones. Gandhi being a reckless party animal is a great foil to the nature of the man himself. Joan of Arc being goth is really funny in contrast to her real-life connection to God.
Cliches
Clone High was humor ahead of its time. Meta-humor is popular now more than ever. Clone High presents meta-self-aware humor by taking every opportunity to use a cliche of ’90s teen dramas. There are multiple moments in this series where a character chases another through the airport screaming slowly, “Don’t get on that plane!” Interactions are often preceded by “The biggest mistake of my life,” and characters more than often monologue emotional word soup.
Combined with an original soundtrack displaying the strongest cliches of ’90s grunge and emo music. The cliches and foils are almost funnier now that we can look back. These Clone High will take every chance it can get to remind you of the most embarrassing and saturated garbage plot devices that used to keep us on the edge of our seats.
