Trivia / Code Lyoko

• Acting for Two: Egregiously, given that there are only so many English voice actors in France:
  • All of the voices are done by seven people, each of whom has one main role and then several minor roles (with the exception of Paul Bandey, who is only Franz Hopper). Jérémie and Aelita are the same person, for one. So are Jim and William. Sharon Mann, as both Jérémie and Aelita, is not just talking to herself, she's romancing herself!
  • All background characters are quite noticeably major characters with a slightly different inflection. The only exceptions are Ben of the Subdigitals, who is voiced by Noam Kaniel (who also sings the theme song), and a purported background cameo in "The Secret" by three fans who visited the studio during recording.
• Ascended Fanon: "Lyoko-Warriors" ("Lyoko-Guerriers" in French) originally was a name given to the protagonists by the French fans. Starting with season 3, the characters in-story started using it as their official name.
• Banned in China: This cartoon once aired in China and only the first two seasons were aired before it was banned permanently from airing on Chinese televisions ever again. The reason for the ban? This cartoon was disguised as a Chinese cartoon in order to get a primetime airslot (5PM-8PM) which violated Chinese rule which was enforced in 2006, in where only Chinese programming were aired on primetime airslot.
• Blooper: The gate at the entrance of Kadic Academy sometimes reads Lycée Lakanal, the real-life school that Kadic is based on.
• Conclusion in Another Medium: The last seven episodes wound up not making broadcast and were shown only on Cartoon Network's online video service.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: The English-language voice cast has Barbara Weber-Scaff as Ulrich, Mirabelle Kirkland as Kiwi, and Sharon Mann as Jérémie — and that's just the main cast.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Ulrich, Jérémie, Odd, Yumi, Milly, Tamiya, and Kiwi popped up in a short produced a year before Garage Kids called "Les Enfants". The only one with noticeable design differences is Ulrich.
• Executive Meddling:
  • The reason why the show was so formulaic in Season 1. Executives thought that a serial plot-line would confuse viewers. Allegedly, the Return To The Past was implemented specifically because of this executive demand as a means of maintaining status quo, which would easily explain the later decision to write in an excuse to use it less in subsequent seasons.
    • Also detailed in What Could Have Been concerning the Garage Kids concept, but it is precisely because of this trope that the current iteration of Code Lyoko exists. The original plan was to fully develop the world presented in the pilot, but executives considered it too dark and did not approve of the concept of the Lyoko Warriors keeping their abilities in the real world. Thomas Romain left the project to work on Ōban Star-Racers as a result, and it was not until Sophie Decroisette was brought on board that the series would start to properly congeal.
  • This would likewise continue with the production of Seasons 3 and 4; originally Season 3 and Season 4 were going to be around the same length as standard seasons, but Season 3's episode count was cut in half, with some leftover slots used to make the prequel two-parter, and Season 4 was slightly extended. However, it too did not escape meddling. As seen below with What Could Have Been, numerous concepts were proposed for the Season, but many were rejected, with budget cuts forcing the deletion of the Mountain Replika.
    • Said meddling is also the reason why the lore concerning the supercomputer did not progress beyond Season 2; executives considered exploring it to be too complicated and thus the producers were not allowed to pursue the plotline of Project: Carthage any further past that point.
• He Also Did:
  • Storyboard artist Thomas Astruc was also a storyboard supervisor on Totally Spies! and would later go on to create another French CGI cartoon, Miraculous Ladybug.
  • Thomas Romain eventually moved to Japan and joined Satelight, where he has worked as a designer on many of their anime since 2009.
• Inspiration for the Work: According to an interview with Word of God, it was inspired by Serial Experiments Lain. Yeah.
• Follow the Leader: For all the show's current obscurity, you can note in Gormiti: The Lords of Nature Return! that its influece on European animation lived on.
• Missing Episode:
  • Eight episodes — including the last seven — wound up not making broadcast and were shown only on Cartoon Network's online video service. Executive Meddling is suspected.
  • In the Cartoon Network run, a major plot element was left unexplained because of a missing episode. "Lab Rat" was the episode where Jérémie developed the technology to translate the Lyoko Warriors' avatars into the physical world, but it was never officially shown for reasons only known to the people at CN. Thus, as far as the viewers were concerned, Ulrich and Yumi teleporting into XANA's factory looked like a complete Ass Pull.
• No Export for You: Only two of the CL novels have been released in French, the show's mother tongue, and they were in no language but Italian for a year and a half. An English release will likely never occur, and fans have taken it upon themselves to translate it.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Although Matthew Geczy is most remembered as Odd's English voice actor, he was voiced by Christophe Caballero in the episodes "Teddygozilla" and "Log Book".
  • Although Jodi Forrest is most remembered as Sissi's English voice actress, she was voiced by Christine Flowers in earlier episodes.
  • Paul Bandey voiced Franz Hopper in Season Two but his appearance in Season Four was done by Alan Wenger. Bandey would reprise his part years later in the fan-created simulation IFSCL.
  • Suzanne Hertz was principally played in English by Jodi Forrest except in "Satellite" where Mirabelle Kirkland filled in for some reason.
  • Kiwi's barks were normally provided by Mirabelle Kirkland except for "Nothing in Particular", where Barbara Weber-Schaff filled in.
  • This also occurs when different voice actors voice the same background character between episodes. For instance, Barbara Weber-Schaff, Mirabelle Kirkland, Sharon Mann, and Jodi Forrest have all voiced Heidi Klinger.
• Rereleased for Free: The official YouTube channel has the entire series and Code Lyoko: Evolution up for free in English and French.
• Screwed by the Network: At the end of the fourth season, Cartoon Network, with no reason given, dropped the show, leaving eight episodes to be killed off on their horrible online video service. They then gave the show a brief 6 AM slot for reruns a few months later before killing it off entirely. And it got them good ratings. A Cartoon Network executive confirmed on his Twitter that he personally disliked the show.
• Throw It In!: In the episode "Tidal Wave", Odd's final line, "I'm so hungry!", was ad-libbed by his dub actor. This is notable because you typically aren't supposed to ad-lib or improvise in works being dubbed in other languages.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Garage Kids, in spades. One YouTube user who commented put it best:
    I would have liked to see how the series would have turned out if it were done this way. Edgier art in the world, more detail in Lyoko, Ulrich as a badass silent protagonist, and epic music? Yes please.
    • Major details would've been a murkier dividing line concerning the real and virtual worlds, as the characters were meant to retain their powers in both, along with a serial story-line that would've lasted for 26 episodes. Due to Executive Meddling, this did not come to pass. Thomas Romain would eventually clarify that had the original premise been made, it would've been akin to a mix of Lain and Den-noh Coil, and following on that, would've been significantly darker than what Season 1 turned out to be.
    • In order to reinforce the blurred boundary between the real and virtual worlds, the plan was for the show to be completely made in traditional animation. Fears of causing an inability to distinguish the two worlds for the target audience, along with Antefilms needing to give its 3D department work, put an end to this idea.
    • Promotional materials indicate that the original plans involved using the characters seen in the Les Enfants short as the basis to build up the cast. By the time the transition to the final setting came about, all of these characters aside from the Lyoko Warriors and Milly and Tamiya were deleted.
    • The darker artwork in the real world was due to the series being planned to be far more overtly Cyberpunk, again seen in the Les Enfants short and the real-world scenes in the pilot. This element was phased out during the transition to the final product.
  • Combined with Early-Installment Weirdness, the Season One show bible contains many different ideas than what was provided in latter seasons (owing to Sophie Decroisette rewriting it for Season 2 onwards), and only having glimpses seen in some Season 1 episodes.
    • Overall, suspicions about the Lyoko Warrior's activities were meant to form a larger subplot, with Milly and Tamiya being more involved (a concept at most seen in "Teddygozilla") with the group, Jim actively searching for evidence (only seen in the Season 1 finale), and Sissi becoming more suspicious and driven as the series went on.
    • Speaking of Sissi, she wasn't meant to have a crush on Ulrich and was a more straightforward antagonist who was envious of Yumi having more attention than her, with none of the Hidden Depths she would display in the final product.
    • Mrs. Hertz was meant to have a slightly larger role, with her classes having a bit of relevance to the Lyoko Warriors' struggles with XANA. At best, this is only seen with XANA using her classes for attacks in the final product.
    • Franz Hopper would've discovered the supercomputer (instead of building it), which was in fact, named XANA, and he was the one to have created Aelita, who was an Artificial Intelligence instead of a human. A mysterious "bug" in the supercomputer would've been what caused his disappearance. This is a notably Lighter and Softer interpretation than what was suggested in the Garage Kids promotional materials, in which Franz (at the time referred to only as The Professor) deliberately created the Supercomputer complex, but eventually went insane while his project went out of control and deliberately abandoned.
    • The tower deactivation sequence was meant to invoke more of Aelita's intended nature as an Artificial Intelligence, whereupon she would literally merge with the tower to activate the Return to the Past. Likewise, while the final product makes it clear that the scanners are what makes an individual immune to the memory-erasing effects, the prototype had Aelita grant them immunity instead.
    • The Love Triangle was meant to be between Aelita, Odd, and Jérémie, albeit more due to Jérémie being a Green-Eyed Monster than any real legitimate romantic feelings on Odd's part. Hints of this could still be found here and there in the final product, such as the conflict in "Saint Valentine's Day".
  • William's original name was going to be Orlando, but it was quickly dropped in favor of the tribute to Scottish historical warrior William Wallace (whose town of Dunbar, Scotland would be used as William's last name).
  • Some concepts that were planned for Season 4, such as Ulrich having a visor on his outfit and Odd having larger claws, were scrapped, along with several proposed monster designs. Two Replika-based episodes were also cut from the season, most prominently the Mountain Replika, which got far enough to have a real-world background model for its supercomputer made..
    • Of the proposed monsters, most of which were limited to concept art, only one, the Wurm, got far enough into development to actually have a model be created and having its abilities described, whereupon it would be used as a terrain-destruction monster that could delete anything it came into contact with, and if hit anywhere else besides its eye, had a Healing Factor that would just create more of it.
  • William was originally supposed to rejoin the team after being freed from XANA's control, as seen with the fourth NavSkid that was obviously supposed to be his. This never came to pass, and it took Code Lyoko: Evolution for William to finally come back to the team.
  • A movie based on the franchise was in the planning stages during the series run, called Code Lyoko: Havoc. It was originally meant to be a two-part episode (much like XANA Awakens before it), before being ultimately turned into a film. Sophie Decroisette described the film as Code Lyoko meets The Terminator with several scripts being processed before being scrapped due to financial and distribution reasons, according to Decroisette:
    • The plot was to involve a buggy Return to the Past that would have flung Yumi, Odd and Ulrich 60 years into the future with the future showing the full consequences of XANA's power if he isn't stopped with scenes of a destroyed Paris and Kadic overrun with robots, creatures and humans all under the AI's control with the trio teaming up with their adult counterparts (who would have likely led a resistance group), with them doing whatever they can to return to the past in time to save Aelita and Jeremie from XANA's deadliest attack yet (which caused the incident that lead to XANA's ultimate victory) while also preventing the Bad Future from happening.

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