It may not have enjoyed the widest audience in the world, but to those who saw it, madcap MTV ‘toon Clone High is still a hilarious treat. Now, Lego Movie/Jump Street duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who co-created the show with Scrubs man Bill Lawrence, want to bring it back in some fashion.
Clone High, which ran for 13 amazing episodes back in 2002/2003, was set in a high school that also served as a mad military experiment designed to clone famous historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi, with the resulting school-age kids rounded up and sent for education. Sounds weird, was brilliant.
You have to imagine that with the combined clout of their **Lego **success and the encouraging early figures for 22 Jump Street, Lord and Miller could wrangle almost any project back into existence, with studios clamouring for their magical comedy touch. But as they’ve explained to Collider, it’s really not that easy, even if you have had a run of hit movies.
“We talk very regularly now with Bill every few months or so, we talk about ‘How are we going to get this back in whatever form we can?’” says Miller. “We get our lawyers to talk to each other, and business affairs people to talk to each other. It’s very complicated. It’s very hard because it’s at Viacom/MTV, we have a TV deal at Fox, he has a TV deal at Warner Bros.”
And it’s not just rights issues holding them back. While the trio isn’t sure whether the concept would be best served as a movie or a new TV series, there’s also the question of tone.
“It’s also a tricky thing because we basically made a PG-13 TV series, and if you’re gonna do a movie you wonder, ‘Am I gonna have to justify the budget that it’s gonna take by trying to broaden this to a family audience, and is that gonna kill what was fun about the original thing?’ Because there’s so much blood in the original series. And JFK sex jokes.”
Here’s hoping they manage to pull it off eventually – JFK sex jokes and all.