Defrosting Historical Figures (Again)

We chat with showrunners Erica Rivinoja and Erik Durbin about the much-anticipated, revived Clone High series on Max.

- By Ramin Zahed -

Who could have predicted that more than two decades after Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Bill Lawrence’s animated show Clone High was canceled by MTV after only one season on the air, the cult fave would make a miraculous comeback? That’s right — Abe Lincoln, Joan of Arc, JFK, Cleopatra and some new second-generation figures (Harriet Tubman, Frida Kahlo, Confucius) are back to experience high school in a new version of the show on Max this month.

Set in a high school for clones of historical figures, the series finds the clones thawed out after 20 years on ice to resume the experiment with new clone classmates — as they deal with the madness of adjusting to new cultural norms and highly dramatic teen relationships! Produced by MTV Entertainment Studios, Clone High executive producers include Lord, Miller, Lawrence, Erica Rivinoja (South Park, Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm) and

Erik Durbin (Last Man on Earth, American Dad!). Returning stars include Will Forte as Abe and Nicole Sullivan as Joan, Phil Lord as Scudworth and Chris Miller as JFK and Mr. B, Christa Miller as Candide, Donald Faison as George Washington Carver and Judah Miller as Scangrade.

New Faces and Voices

“When they reached out to me to be the showrunner, I was genuinely very excited to work on this new show,” says writer-producer Rivinoja, whose impressive credits include South Park, Last Man on Earth and Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm. “I used to write on the original show 21 years ago, and now we had the chance to add new characters and bring it back alive into this world. I had to leave at some point to direct the upcoming animated movie adaptation of Cat in the Hat (2024), so we needed someone else to shepherd the project. That’s when my friend Erik Durbin, with whom I’d worked on Last Man on Earth, who was also a big fan of the original show, joined the project. We kind of shared the baton on the series.”

Both showrunners point out that they love the new characters and situations they encounter in the new 2023 project. “We have a whole bunch of new characters and they are much more representative, diverse, unique and weird,” says Rivinoja. “It has been really a lot of fun to have them all and get new people involved. In the original series, I was the only woman in the writers’ room. No offence to EriK, but it has been really nice to have more women around. The hardest part has been trying to do what Chris [Miller] and Phil [Lord] did, and that one season is so beloved. I felt a lot of pressure trying to live up to that.”

Durbin agrees. “The great part about it is you’ve got these other characters who can, you know, show a broader range of the world that we live in. We have to do right by these characters, so the challenging aspect is making sure like their personalities and points of view mesh into this beautiful little show that flew high with three main character. Now, we have seven central characters and a bigger core of friends, so it’s important that we make them all feel interconnected.”

One character that is not returning to Clone High is Gandhi, voiced by comic Michael McDonald in the first season of the show. Rivinoja points out that that character was the reason the show was canceled. Many viewers were offended by the depiction of the Indian national hero as a party animal and a womanizer. At the time, many politicians, including Gandhi’s grandson, held a hunger strike in front of the MTV India offices during a visit by the then-head of Viacom.

“We all love Gandhi, but he was the reason the show went off the air in the first place,” says Rivinoja. “So we just didn’t want to touch that.”

“It’s been nice to have characters who represent a larger swath of our world and they each bring their own backgrounds and heritage,” says Durbin. “They each have different ways of being dramatic and funny. You have someone who is carefree like Confucius. We also have these great comedians portraying characters like Harriet Tubman and Cleopatra. It’s been so much fun to work with them.”

“I also just love our new character Topher Bus (voiced by Neil Casey), who is actually a clone of Christopher Co- lumbus, who is trying hard to rebrand himself since Columbus has been justifiably canceled,” adds Rivinoja. “He is really awful, but it’s really fun to poke fun at the idea of people trying way too hard to be cool and relevant, which is in fact what every teenager tries to do.”

She adds, “One of the things I love about the new characters is that I feel the initial characters really fitted into the classic tropes of the time, like the jock, the nerd, the popular girl. Life has evolved in the past 20 years, so our new characters don’t fit those tropes so much. In a way, it made our job a little bit harder, but it has also made the show more interesting.”

The 2023 version of Clone High is also faithful to the original show’s visual aesthetics, which came from industry heavyweight Mike Moon, a former Disney and Netflix exec who is now heading the Moonlight label at Illumination. The animation production is handled by L.A.’s ShadowMachine (Tuca & Bertie, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) and Ottawa’s Jam Filled (A Tale Dark & Grimm).

“The original show had this wonderful homemade feel to it because it was actually done on the cheap,” says Rivinoja. “Of course, animation has come a long way the past two decades, so it was really important to us to make sure that it still held on to all of the hand-crafted qualities. Mike Moon’s original de- signs were really forward-thinking and quite unique. We never wanted the new show to look too sleek, and it was really important for us to maintain the essence of that first year.”

Creative Spirit

When asked about his favorite episodes of the new season, Durbin says a clear standout is one written by Rivinoja, which explores the backstory of the Mr. B., principal Scudworth’s loyal robot butler, vice principle and dehumidifier. “It’s a really outstanding episode, and the storytelling is just super fun and different,” he notes. “We hope Guillermo del Toro will be proud of us. There’s also a musical episode which is really fun.”

The showrunners are hoping that audiences tuning in the new show this month will be able to relate to the stories and the experiences of the new class of high school clones. “We hope they’ll find some laughs at how seriously these kids are taking their lives and their attempts to just be teenagers,” says Durbin.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, too,” says Rivinoja. “I hope people will see themselves and their pain and drama on the screen. I mean, high school wasn’t great for any of us … I am guessing that anyone who is reading Animation Magazine didn’t have a great time in high school either!” ◆

The new Clone High premieres on Max on May 23, with two new episodes debuting each Thursday. A second season is already in production.