Clone High was masterminded by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who’ve subsequently gone on to make a series of stealth attack masterpieces out of unlikely sources, from Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (a film of a 34-page children’s book) to 21 Jump Street (a reboot of a slightly implausible 1980s cop show) and most recently, The LEGO Movie (a film made out of LEGO!)

Their latest, 22 Jump Street, takes the undercover antics of detectives Schmidt and Jenko into college. It’s been a huge hit since its advance opening in the UK last Friday and it looks set to do well in the US too. Despite that success, Lord and Miller have (perhaps only half-jokingly) said that their whole movie career together has merely been a pitch for a second season of Clone High.

In retrospect, Clone High very much feels the kicking-off point for some of the stuff they were doing in 21 Jump Street, making a hell of a statement about both teen movies and buddy cop action flicks.

Clone High arrived right at the point when dramatic shows about the trials and tribulations of teenagers were hugely popular on American networks. For instance, over at Cartoon Network around the same time, the crew behind Batman: The Animated Series were asked to look into making “teenage Batman”, a concept the showrunners eventually wrangled into the far-better-than-it-sounds Batman Beyond.

Lord and Miller didn’t have the Dark Knight on their side, but they could always hang their pitch on what Abe Lincoln was like as a teenager. If it were only a parody of shows like Dawson’s Creek, Clone High would have been bang-on with its spoofing of “very special episodes”, covering issues such as drug addiction, finding prom dates and the inevitable “tonight, someone dies” episode. But as in all of their movies since, they added a whole different dimension by also include teenaged versions of different historical icons.