Began production at Touchstone Television and was going to be aired on Fox. Disney relinquished the rights when Miller and Lord took the series to MTV. Touchstone still got credit, though.
While the original run was co-produced by Nelvana and MTV, the revival was produced by MTV Entertainment Studios, with Nelvana not being involved in the production.note ShadowMachine, the studio behind Robot Chicken and Bojack Horseman, did the animation instead. Additionally, it streamed on Max rather than airing on MTV itself.
Content Leak: The first episode of the second season leaked on Twitter before the season had an official release date.
Head Writers Judah Miller and his brother Murray Miller play Scangrade and Catherine the Great (but only in the first season) respectively.
Executive Meddling: Ashley Parker Angel's appearance in "Plane Crazy: Gate Expectations" was enforced by MTV as a cross-promotion with Making the Band.
Irony as She Is Cast: Abe, despite being the genetic duplicate of one of the most respected US presidents, has zero leadership skills and fails to get student body president. Will Forte, who plays him, actually was elected freshman president in college.
Invisible Advertising: Season 3 received little advertisement from Max and instead of having episodes released on a weekly basis like Season 2 they were all released on the same day.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: The complete series DVD was only released in Canada, but quickly went out of print. It did eventually make it to iTunes and Amazon Prime, however.
Meme Acknowledgement: Chris Miller has acknowledged revival of memes from the show in late 2020 and posted a video saying he would record a one-line personal message to people who vote early for the 2020 election to encourage voter participation.
Missing Episode: The unaired pilot (titled Clone High School U.S.A.) that was made in 2001 when the series was pitched to FOX currently remains as lost media as of 2022. The only things from the pilot that currently exist are old character designs of the main cast as well as a screenshot of a scene with JFK in it.
For the revival series, Cleopatra is voiced by Arab-American comedian Mitra Jouhari as opposed to Christa Miller, though the latter still has a voice role in the series.
In the Latin American Spanish dub of the revival series, almost every character was recast due to their voice actors either dying, moving away, or retiring. The only exceptions are Abe and the narrator.
Ensemble Dark Horse Van Gogh was voiced by Andy Dick in the series pilot. Because his original voice actor has got into a lot of legal trouble since then, Van Gogh's solo speaking lines in the revival series were taken over by Abe's voice actor (Will Forte).
Reality Subtext: A running theme of the show is the clones angsting over having to live up to the reputations of their famous namesakes, with Gandhi being one who takes it the hardest. Appropriate, since the fact that Mahatma Gandhi is still revered to almost god-like status in India is what got the show canceled. This is also the out-of-universe reason Gandhi is absent from the revival.
Real-Life Relative: Edylu Martínez, the voice of Cleopatra in the Latin American Spanish dub, retired in 2012 and died in 2020 of kidney failure. The character is now dubbed by her daughter, Elsy García.
For the revival series, most of the actors returned to voice their respective characters (Cleo was recast, but her original VA is still on the show), with the sole exception of Andy Dick as Mr. Sheepman and Van Gogh.
The only voice actors who reprised their roles in the Latin American Spanish dub are Juan Guzman as Abe and Angel Balam as the narrator.
Saved from Development Hell: A messy copyright situation between MTV and Nelvana, as well as Lawrence, Lord and Miller having their own contracts to fulfill for Warner Bros. and Sony, respectively, are the main reasons any efforts for a revival couldn't be seriously considered until 2020, 17 years after the show ended.
Science Marches On: "A.D.D.: The Last 'D' is for Disorder" revolves around Gandhi being diagnosed with both attention deficit disorder and "its hyperactive cousin", attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Ten years after the show's first season ended, the American Psychological Association stopped using ADD as a diagnosis, instead merging it with ADHD in the DSM-5. The two variants are now distinguished as inattentive type ADHD (ADD) and hyperactive-impulsive type ADHD ("classical" ADHD).
Tom Green ad-libbed the "albatross" bit in the "ADD" episode. This grew out of a joke he made with the director, saying "This is a cartoon, right? So I can be anything? Even... an albatross??"
Scudworth's emotional breakdown over his call from John Stamos was mostly Phil Lord ranting about most of his own minor insecurities, such as how messy his car was and how he keeps forgetting his card when going to the submarine sandwich restaurant.
Troubled Production: According to the cast and crew during an interview in honor of the show's 15th anniversary, there were problems working around each others' schedules for their projects. Christa Miller recalls working on Clone High, Scrubs, and The Drew Carey Show within the same week and briefly developing amnesia from stress as a result.
According to this interview, several plans for season 2 and 3 were made, such as another addition to the Love Triangle, possibly an older teacher clone, Gandhi revealed as being the clone of Gary Coleman instead of Mahatma Gandhi due to a DNA mixup, and time travel used to extend the clones' high school years in a parody of Beverly Hills, 90210.
Mr. Butlerton was originally named Mr. Belvetron, hence why he calls everyone "Wesley."
The series was originally pitched to Fox, with early materials for the show displaying slightly different character designs for the cast that emphasized more realistic proportions. Additionally, early blurbs highlight different personalities for a few characters, such as Genghis Khan instead being the school bully.
The overall plot they had for the series was for season one to be junior year, season two the first half of senior year, season three the second half, and at the end they would go through a wormhole and repeat senior year in season four, and if there was a season five, they'd make it college.
It also states that season two could've started out with the three main characters walking like in the pilot (except to senior year), having forgotten what had happened over the course of the summer, and putting the pieces of the puzzle together to find out how they got out of the cliffhanger.
Also, due to the controversy of Gandhi's character, the creators had to pitch two alternatives of the show to MTV, one where Gandhi mysteriously disappears and turns out to have somehow sacrificed himself in the meat locker to save his friends, which would just altogether drop his character from the show, and the other where they keep the character while writing in that there was a mix up in the lab and Gandhi is actually the clone of Gary Coleman.
Writer Revolt: While they admitted to being generally left alone by the network, the few times MTV gave them notes, the showrunners managed to have fun with it.
The first episode received some complaints that it didn't properly establish who the characters were meant to be clones of, which is why they all address one another by their full names in the second episode.
Mr. Butlertron was originally going to be named Mr. Belvetron, but couldn't for legal reasons. Scudworth mentioning that he doesn't know why Mr. Butlertron calls everyone "Wesley" was the showrunners ribbing MTV about it.
The creators were forced to do a cross-promotion with Making the Band by having Ashley Parker Angel from O-Town (whose formation was the subject of the reality show's first season) as a guest star. They were not told, however, how to write the episode, so they made all of Angel's lines Self-Deprecation and had every other character acting as if he was the single most famous and important musician who ever lived so that nobody took it seriously.
saying he would record a one-line personal message to people who vote early for the 2020 election to encourage voter participation.