‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’: Inside an Animated Spinoff for the Ages
This post contains spoilers for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which is currently streaming on Netflix.
The first episode of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off seems designed to make even the most passionate fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic books — or the cult classic film Edgar Wright made from them — wonder if perhaps they’ve had their fill of Scott and friends up in Toronto. Much of the premiere, written by O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski, is simply recreating scenes familiar from the comics and the movie. The dialogue is tweaked here and there — instead of Scott (Michael Cera) trying to impress Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) with Pac-Man trivia, he talks to her about Sonic the Hedgehog — but almost all of it is material the target audience knows well, just done as anime instead of on the page or in live-action.
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But then Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha) kills Scott in Scott’s first duel with a member of the League of Evil Exes, rather than the other way around, and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off turns out to be anything but a slavish copy of the previous versions of the story. There are trips through time and space for Scott (who’s not exactly dead) to meet Older Scott (now voiced by Will Forte) and then Even Older Scott (Forte again). While the plot of the show deviates wildly from the source material, one running gag involves various evil exes attempting to star in a movie adapted from the events of the comic — Wallace (Kieran Culkin) somehow winds up playing himself, and seduces leading man Todd (Brandon Routh) before coldly breaking his heart. Supervillain Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman) is revealed to be the ex-boyfriend of Julie (Aubrey Plaza), whose real, overwhelmingly Canadian name is Gordon Goose. Oh, and Ramona fights an army of paparazzi ninjas, while Knives (Ellen Wong) joins Sex Bob-omb and later helps Stephen Stills (Mark Webber) write a musical inspired by the movie that’s inspired by how the timeline should have gone. (Got all that?)
If you know and love these characters, Scott Pilgrim is a delightful funhouse mirror of the familiar stories — and the only way, ultimately, that O’Malley would have wanted to revisit this world again. O’Malley and Grabinski spoke with Rolling Stone about how and why all these changes came about, how the movie’s cast felt about taking their characters in new directions, and a lot more.
Bryan, Edgar Wright has said that you weren’t particularly enthusiastic about doing just another retelling of the story from the comics. Is that right? And, if so, why?
O’Malley: Me and Edgar both get the same kind of comments all the time, from Internet random people, like, “What about all the stuff that’s in the books and not in the movie? What about the stuff you left on the cutting room floor?” I think he was always keen to shut those people up. I just couldn’t go back and do the exact same thing I did when I was 25. It didn’t make any sense to me. I really couldn’t put myself in that headspace until I had dinner with BenDavid.
So what happened at the dinner?
Grabinski: Bryan and I were having a dinner that had nothing to do with Scott Pilgrim, and we never planned on working together. And somewhere in the middle of our dinner, Bryan mentioned the show, and why he was hesitant. We had a long talk about those things he was feeling, about not wanting to redo it. We talked about thematic reasons to revisit it, like spending more time with Ramona, or more time with the exes. And at some point, I blurted out, kind of as a joke, “What if you just have Scott seemingly die at the end of the first fight with Matthew Patel? And then what if you made a movie about Scott Pilgrim starring Lucas Lee?” Right after I said that, Bryan immediately sparked to it. We started talking about how funny and interesting that was, and ideas just started flowing from there.
You spend more time with all the Evil Exes, but Matthew Patel in particular gets way more shine than previously, as the guy who “kills” Scott and then takes over Gideon’s empire. What was the interest in doing that?
O’Malley: Once we figured out the idea of turning the main plot on its head, and having Scott be defeated, then it was just a logical process of asking, “What happens to everyone else? Where does everyone go? If Gideon’s plan is a success, how do all those people react to it?” Just exploring where the exes end up in that scenario was really fun and funny.
Grabinski: The whole show was just us spending a lot of time talking through what would happen, in the rules of this world, based on who these characters are, and also what the most interesting thing could be. Sometimes, you’d just text Bryan, like, “What if Gideon was Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places?” Or, “How mad would Matthew be if he beats Scott and doesn’t get Ramona?”
Dan Aykroyd is Canadian. Gordon Goose is perhaps the most Canadian fictional name ever written.
O’Malley: We laughed so hard that day when we came up with that name.
Grabinski: I wrote the monologue about McDonald’s, and I was so proud of it. I sat on the couch in Bryan’s office, and he says, “This doesn’t work. He should have had a different name, and it needs to be really good.” I was like, “Harumph!” And I remember him saying, “What if his name was Gordon Goose?” I must have laughed for three straight days. That’s the real magic of no one telling us no: we can just decide that Gideon’s name was Gordon Goose.
O’Malley: It’s so Canadian. Jason Schwartzman and Aubrey Plaza really took to it. Apparently, she was calling him Goose on the set of their other movie for a while. Really cute to have our stupid stuff catch up with them.
The movie doesn’t do a lot with Young Neil, and he’s very prominent here.
O’Malley: I think BenDavid kind of identifies with Young Neil.
Grabinski: There’s a lot of shows and movies where you make a character a lot like you. I thought, If I am going to make anyone have my interests, I should make it the dumbest person on the show. Because if it’s a cool person, what am I doing?
Even before Matthew beats Scott and the story changes, there’s not a lot about Scott dating Knives. And once everyone thinks he’s dead, you very quickly take Knives in a new direction, rather than dwelling on her grief over Scott or her jealousy of Ramona. Why was that?
O’Malley: I guess we wanted her to have something to do that wasn’t about romance. That was more about self-discovery. Because her arc ends up being something about grief. She loses what she thinks was the love of her life, but then she realizes that it was just a blip, and probably not a good idea in the first place. At an earlier stage, I had thought of a little more for her and Stephen Stills. It didn’t all make it in, so we only get little glimpses of their career progression. Out of anyone, I do wish I could have had a little more of Stephen Stills.
What were some of the ideas behind the Scott Pilgrim musical that Knives writes with Stephen Stills — both the idea of doing it, and particular musical inspirations for it?
Grabinski: We have a lot of Sondheim in the season. So that goes without saying. We decided we wanted to have a musical. And we decided we would have Knives and Stephen in Ishtar songwriting mode. And then we wrote the musical in that same way, where Joe Trapanese, one of our composers, was sitting at a piano. Bryan and I went over to his house, and I proceeded to play five or six songs that were bullseyes I was trying to hit. Then I talked about which characters I thought should be singing one of those songs, started pitching ideas and singing them, wandering around the room, while Joe was turning in actual lyrics. And almost all of our inspirations got thrown out, except that the one about the Evil Exes, where they’re blurting out what they are, and that was specifically West Side Story. But I had some very specific references I was very excited about. I wanted to do an homage to the opening song of A Strange Loop. I’ve never written any music before, let alone a musical. And sitting with Bryan and pitching stuff and singing terribly, and Joe turning it into actual music, was absurd.
And how did you decide that the famous “Bread makes you fat?” scene was going to wind up as part of the musical?
Grabinski: That was a rule that Bryan and I had from the beginning: We didn’t want to repeat any jokes from the movie, and risk doing them worse, but we did want to do callbacks. So that’s actually hilarious in a different way. It was important to me to figure out how to do “Bread makes you fat” in a completely new way. So when they first do it with Stephen and Knives, you assume that’s the end of it. But then it comes back in a much more elaborate form later, with a full orchestra that we had in Nashville, and a full choir singing the really stupid joke.
Both the comic and the movie keep questioning whether Scott and Ramona should actually be together. The show seems to argue more in favor of them, since we see how much she cares about him after only a single date, and then we see how much she still cares even after their marriage has gotten messed up in the future. Bryan, have your feelings about that relationship changed over the last 20 years?
O’Malley: Not really. I think every relationship can be interrogated. It’s not really that she’s so passionate at first [in the show]. I think what’s fun about it, and darker about it, is it seems like none of his friends seem like they would be investigating this. Like, if Scott had disappeared and Ramona wasn’t around, no one would even notice that he was gone, or they would just assume he was dead. I think it’s fun that, as you go through the first few episodes, she is the one who starts to pick up the thread, even though she barely knew him. They had just one date, and that was pretty good. And the rest of his friends are like, “Eh, he’s dead.”
Grabinski: And there were sparks. When they kissed, that happened, and that means something in the world of the show — whether that functions as a metaphor, or whatever. It’s a thing that’s mentioned a lot in the season, and there’s a difference between a first kiss that means something, so your gut makes you feel like it’s not something you can let go. Even by the end of the season, Wallace doesn’t believe in sparks, and then he has his kiss in one of the final scenes. Those are some dumb bread crumbs, but they matter in terms of the storytelling of this weird cartoon world.
Is the guy Wallace kisses at the end supposed to be Older Wallace’s husband from the future timeline?
Grabinski: I’m never going to say what I think there. If we wanted that to be definitive, we would have said or shown something.
O’Malley: We leave it on a note where you know Wallace has the capability of finding some kind of true love. Maybe this is it, or maybe it’ll be someone else down the line. But the guy at the end does resemble Mobile, who’s the boyfriend from the books.
Grabinski: And there are sparks, so we know it’s true love!
Where did the idea come from to incorporate time travel, and introduce us to older versions of Scott and Ramona?
Grabinski: The first idea was that. A lot of our dinner was talking about that. The rest of the stuff, we figured out later. But at the dinner, it was, “Who would have taken him, and why?” It just felt correct. We both love sci-fi stuff, and the idea of having a future episode felt irresistible creatively.
O’Malley: Obviously, we’re both older, and we have beards and shit like that. Sometime either early in the pandemic or right before it started, I sketched an older Scott and Ramona. And on that page, I wrote, “2Scott2Pilgrim.” But it was for nothing; I was just fucking around. But, yeah, I think I probably showed it to BenDavid. For me, that was the genesis.
Grabinski: Somehow, that connected with the other things we were doing. But it ended up evolving to the point where we felt like only one actor could play him, and wrote toward that.
Why was Will Forte the one actor who could play him?
O’Malley: Just because he can sell the pathos, and the patheticness, and the menace and weirdness. He can sell all of that with no effort.
Grabinski: Will is so likable, no matter what. There’s so many characters he plays, where if you gave it to another actor, I would turn it off. But with him, I find it always so endearing and likable, even when he’s playing a psychopath. Which is not the point here, but it felt like the exact right sensibility for him. And it’s so funny to me, the idea of Michael and Will. Him being the different actor as the 37-year-old version will never not make me laugh.
O’Malley: BenDavid kept saying, “Old Scott Pilgrim. 37 years old.” And it was so funny to us every time, because we’re older than that.
Grabinski: Having him be treated like this old loser, and he’s still younger than me? It’s either funny or it’s not. And it’s funny to us.
O’Malley: It’s both.
What is the state of the world meant to be in the Older Scott timeline? Because in parts it’s sparsely populated and the grass is wildly overgrown, and other parts seem fine?
Grabinski: It’s before now. If you actually think of the timeline, it’s our past [the late 2010s]. When I grew up, I was so sure Back to the Future II would happen. So this was meant to be an alternate timeline of things we expected, leaning into all the failed guesses from sci-fi movies in the Eighties and Nineties.
O’Malley: When I was writing, I had to think about, “What would it sound like if I traveled back in time and told 2004 me about the present?”I wouldn’t want to tell them specifically what’s bad. We were writing this during Covid. The world felt apocalyptic, but also it felt strangely peaceful for a while. I wanted to capture that. That’s what we told [animators] Science Saru. It’s kinda scary, but it’s kinda nice. It’s got a lot of greenery, and some people are wearing masks. I think they really nailed it. We didn’t give them too many visual notes, as usual.
Grabinski: Well, we did give them notes, but they would make it so much better . Like, we’d say, “We want the door to the virtual reality chamber to be the door from Akira.” But they don’t just do the door from Akira, they turn the door from Akira into a GameBoy. They would make it cooler. The only other real touchstone is Death Stranding, which is one of my favorite video games of all time, which involves delivering packages in a post-Apocalyptic future. Ramona delivered packages in the present-day, so why wouldn’t she?
Where did the idea come from for Todd and Wallace to hook up?
O’Malley: I think mostly BenDavid came up with that. There’s no real answer. We wanted to extend the movie within the show. We wanted to use Todd somehow. It struck us as really funny. But also with some kind of heart to it. Brandon [Routh] just really delivered on all those scenes. And those were the scenes where Kieran [Culkin] was famously cracking up on the Zoom. He didn’t know what would be on the next page, and it was sucking and funny every time.
Grabinski: Some of these things have answers where I could talk for hours about the decision, and some are just one-sentence answers: “It felt right.” That’s one of those things where it felt like, “That’s what would happen.” And I like Brandon getting to be funny, because I think he’s very underrated as a comic performer.
How did Michael Cera react to learning that Scott actually wasn’t going to be in a lot of the show?
O’Malley: I think Michael loved it. He was in Twin Peaks: The Return, where the main character disappears for 17 episodes. I think he got it immediately. He was a really good cheerleader for the rest of the cast, always very positive.
Grabinski: He texted Bryan after every recording session, like, “I think this is the best thing ever.” There were so many moments that were really validating in terms of how much the cast loved it. Because there could have been a world where they were all like, “What the fuck is this?”
O’Malley: We kind of made it meta. We made some of the characters turn into actors. Then our actors had to play those characters turn into actors playing other characters from the story. I was really happy with their reaction. They were our first audience, basically.
Grabinski: If Michael hadn’t understood it, we would have been in a lot of trouble. But he really got it.
The animation lets you do action sequences on a scale that wouldn’t have been possible for the movie, like the big ninja fight, or the whole group battling Even Older Scott.
O’Malley: The ninjas, there would be so many extras alone, or CG ninjas. The animation is just so magical in those scenes.
Grabinski: I’m a big big action guy. Bryan’s job is to be like, “Do we need action here?” And my job is to say, “We need more action here.” If there was a fight every episode, it would get stale. So we play with that concept. For me, it was a dream, because I spend so much time writing movies where I get depressed thinking, I can never do this, they’ll never pay for this. I had a meeting for a movie where they said, “Well, if we cut out this whole car chase, we can fit the schedule and do this and this.” And I was like, “What if Saru drew the car chase?” But that’s not how it works in live-action. We would have ideas that were really, really big. A lot of times, Bryan would try to pull away my description. The video store fight scene between Ramona and Roxie was something I was really passionate about and had very specific thoughts about it. Bryan was like, “You should get rid of what genre they’re in in every one of those sections. I think they’ll come up with something even better than we expected.” They didn’t even see the draft where I laid out the exact movie they should be in in every section. It paid off to me emotionally in a way I never expected, which is when Roxie and Ramona are having their big catharsis fight, and Ramona’s apologizing, they moved that scene to be on a World War II bomber. When I saw the storyboards, I thought, “It’s going to be so loud on that plane, they should be shouting those lines.” And once they had that environment to have the dialogue, it felt so much more interesting and dramatic to have created this situation. When we have Mae [Whitman] and Mary [Elizabeth Winstead] shouting at each other, there’s a visceral nature to it that feels even better. It was a really good feedback link, I think.
There’s not a lot of Envy in this. Was that a story decision, or was Brie Larson just too busy for more?
Grabinski: There was no writing that was about anyone’s schedule. We wrote it all before we reached out to anyone.
O’Malley: All the characters who were tied to Scott were downplayed a bit, just because Scott is absent for most of the show. We wanted to have a good showcase for her. She has a good song in Episode Two. It’s just one of those things where not every character can get the same amount of spotlight, unfortunately.
Grabinski: And she ends up in a completely different place by the end of the season. I think all of her stuff in the mockmentary episode is really funny, and she ends up as a solo artist with an album produced by Stephen and Knives.
Finally, do you have plans to do any more with this show, or is this a self-contained unit?
O’Malley: It’s self-contained for now. We loved what we did. We put it all in there. We don’t have any ideas lying on the floor. We pretty much put them all in. I never say never, but right now, it seems like it would take about 50 different miracles simultaneously for another season to happen. So we’ll see.
Grabinski: We’re not working on it. We have no official ideas. We put everything we had into this, and we think it has a really great ending that we’re proud of. I don’t make any plans in general. Maybe some day one of us will text each other an idea that’s really great for a Season Two. But for now, my entire brain and heart is in this thing, and just getting it out into the world.
O’Malley: People are always complaining about how shows get canceled after one season. So we hedged our bets immediately, and tried to make a self-contained one season.
Grabinski: Everything that we set up emotionally and thematically in this season has closure. If there was no more TV after November 18, I’d be fine.
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