Maxance Vincent
Thirteen years after Edgar Wright‘s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the world of Bryan Lee O’Malley‘s hit franchise of graphic novels returns in animated form with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which sees all of its original cast from the live-action films reprise their respective roles. Discussions of a potential return for Scott Pilgrim to the screen have been ongoing for a while, but it wasn’t until animated studio Science Saru began to get involved that O’Malley’s interest began to pique, as he explains to Awards Radar on Zoom:
“That was how I came on board with my ears perked up because I love Science Saru. We talked about doing a series, but I left it on the back burner for a while because I didn’t know what to do with it. BenDavid and I had been friends for over a decade, and we were having a friend dinner, and I was venting, “What do I do with Scott Pilgrim? It’s been 10 years since the movie. What do we even do with it?” He then started blurting these inane, idiotic ideas that I immediately thought were the greatest thing ever.”
The Scott Pilgrim creator also expanded on his collaboration with Science Saru, stating they were “equal creative partners, which is a huge deal. We had to have a lot of trust in them. Everything they do was f–ing awesome. Simplified to that. I didn’t have to give them notes or say, “Oh, you better check out the books for this scene.” They were already checking out the books. They knew exactly what they were doing. It was a matter of standing back a lot of the time and letting them cook. We would update our scripts to reflect the story of orders we were doing and continue to dialogue with them through meetings every day.”
On the other hand, co-showrunner BenDavid Grabinski tells Awards Radar that his ideas for the series were risky and took the franchise in a much different direction than most people were expecting:
“It came from a place where everyone expected a straight adaptation, but Bryan didn’t want to do that. We talked about how we can make Ramona drive the story more and spend more time with the supporting characters, even those who die as soon as they appear. I pitched him a solution that was half of a joke but half serious that I never thought anyone would actually do and he loved it, which led to a show.”
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off begins by making it look as if it will be a shot-for-shot animated remake of Wright’s 2010 adaptation until it takes a completely unexpected turn by the end of that episode by putting its titular character (voiced by Michael Cera) out of the picture and focusing more on Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and the seven evil exes. Grabinski says this viewing experience is by design, where he hopes audiences don’t want a shot-for-shot remake by the time the pilot episode gets to its twist ending:
“Hopefully, the first episode will make you realize you didn’t want that. And as you think, “Oh, is this all it’s going to be?” we take an extremely hard right turn. We thought it’d be great to have a story where Ramona was the lead and see what happened to the exes if they didn’t die. The first time I read Scott Pilgrim and saw the movie, I think the experience is similar for most people. When the first fight happens, it scrambles your brain, where you’re like, “Oh, I thought it was watching one thing, and now I’m watching another.” But that has since been normalized because the adaptation has been around forever, and everyone knows the story. So now you have to ask yourself, how do you destabilize the audience as much at that same point in the story in a new way? We found a new way because I think your first way of enjoying any version of Scott Pilgrim should be disorienting, and hopefully, we pulled that off.”
During our full conversation, seen below, we also discussed how difficult the process of bringing the original cast back was, developing the arcs of Ramona and the evil exes, who came up with Super Ramona, and what Bryan Lee O’Malley hopes audiences grasp out of Scott Pilgrim, twenty years after Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life released and changed the landscape of Canadian media.
You can listen to my full interview with Bryan and BenDavid below and stream all episodes of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off on Netflix today:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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