Scott Pilgrim Ticks Off His Fans
The newest addition to the Scott Pilgrim franchise, an anime titled Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, was released on Nov. 17, to a contentious debate amongst fans in regards to the direction in which the story writers decided to take the series.
Normally, the Scott Pilgrim franchise centers around its titular protagonist, an egocentric 22-year-old Canadian man named Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), on his quest to defeat the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off follows an alternate timeline in which Scott himself disappears for most of the series, and Ramona becomes the main focus of the narrative as she tries to figure out what happened to him.
“I didn’t want to do a straight retelling, because that just feels like death to me,” Bryan Lee O’Malley, the author of the Scott Pilgrim comic series and co-writer of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, said in an interview with Variety. Both fans of the series and executives at Universal Studios wanted more Scott Pilgrim content, and though O’Malley was open to the idea of a Scott Pilgrim anime when it was pitched to him in 2019, he had been experiencing a creative block with the series and didn’t know how to continue the story. That is, until BenDavid Grabinski, an indie filmmaker and a friend of O’Malley’s, suggested starting with the same story, before branching off and becoming its own version of the original.
“I pitched [the idea] kind of as a joke, but it sparked something in Bryan’s brain where he immediately was like ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” said Grabinksi.
The initial response to this change, while mostly positive, caused some fans to feel that they’d been misled due to how the show was advertised. The trailer for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off purposefully doesn’t show any of the changes made to the plot, rather showing scenes that are already familiar to those who watched the movie adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. While Grabinski says that he chose scenes that won’t spoil the twist to keep it a surprise, some viewers expressed that the trailer felt like a “bait and switch” or a marketing tactic to make it seem like they’re watching an adaptation of the movie, when it reality, they’re getting something entirely different.
“I really enjoyed the show once I accepted what they were trying to do,” Reddit user grgriffin3 commented. “But I really wish they’d been upfront with their advertising about what this show actually was.”
Despite this, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was a blast to watch. In a year when most of the movies we’re getting from large companies like Disney are sequels and sub-par remakes, this series was a breath of fresh air. I watched Scott Pilgrim Takes Off hoping for something new and exciting, and it went above and beyond my expectations. Each episode contained an action-packed fight sequence with beautiful animation and a cast of perfectly flawed, yet lovable characters.
One of the most common complaints about the Scott Pilgrim series is that all of the characters are one-note and unlikeable, but I think taking Scott himself out of the equation helped solve this, since now the other characters have more of a focus, as well as more room for growth. If you’re new to the series, it’s possible to start with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off like I did, as it does a decent job at introducing the characters and their individual conflicts, but you may have a hard time understanding some parts of the story since it often references the movie Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.
You can find both Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World on Netflix, and the comic series is available at most bookstores, as well as on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Amazon page.
