Clone High - Production

Production

The series was originally developed in 2000 and was titled Clone High School, USA! and the production was overseen by Touchstone Television. It was originally pitched to the Fox Broadcasting Company but was rejected and it was later picked by MTV in 2001. All the original character designs were much different from what they would become even though the characters kept the same physical attibrutes and appearance.

The show uses the process of limited animation and has a flat and very stylized appearance that resembles the animation used in the last generation of Hanna-Barbera cartoons (such as Dexter's Laboratory, Two Stupid Dogs, The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, the last is the show which Lord and Miller admire). The characters and backgrounds are traditionally drawn but the frames and cels are frequently recycled. The reason for the usage of this animation was explained by the co-creator Chris Miller, "We like the snappy pose-to-pose animation, more for reasons of comic timing than anything else, things that aren't expected are funnier: If an anvil's going to fall on your head, it had better not take more than three seconds. That's why we like the quick pose-to-pose stuff. For scenes with more emotional content, the characters move a little slower and more fluidly." and Phil Lord adds, "But we never want the viewer to be paying attention to the animation, because it's there to serve the jokes and the story, we strip out extraneous movements, because we don't want to draw your eye to anything that's not part of a joke." Also, Each episode produced has the budget of approximately $750,000. Gandhi is the most animated character on the show; he requires twice as many story-board poses as any other character.

The series was produced by Bill Lawrence who also produced Scrubs, Spin City and currently Cougar Town. Many of Scrubs alumni provide voices of several characters in Clone High, such as Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, John C. McGinley, Neil Flynn and Christa Miller.

Also, there is an image of a dolphin hidden in almost every episode. In the episode "Raisin the Stakes," there were countless hidden messages that appear to be a parody of subliminal messaging.