Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is the latest take on the nearly two-decades-old world of Scott Pilgrim, and it takes a hard deviation from the original story. Scott, Ramona, their friends, and their exes have been adapted into live-action, video games, and now a full animated series. However, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off isn’t a direct retelling of the original story. According to Scott Pilgrim creator and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Executive Producer/Writer Bryan Lee O’Malley, simply returning to the classic narrative wasn’t exciting. Instead,
it was a pitch from Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Executive Producer/Writer BenDavid Grabinski who pitched a hard deviation. In the animated show, Scott’s apparent death early in the story shifts the spotlight to Ramona and offers a fresh look at the world and its characters. During an interview with That Hashtag Show, Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski discussed the origins of the new direction, finding unlikely pairings in the cast, and teased a potential direction for any future follow-ups to the story.
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Why Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Needed To Be More Than Just Another Adaptation
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is such a hard deviation and follow-up to the original. Why did you both want to see the story evolve this way instead of adapting the original story again?
Bryan Lee O’Malley: All these years later, I’m like, Why did I want to do that? I don’t know. I think I was scared on some level, I was scared of repeating myself or retracing my steps. Dredging up old things, or even reading my own work too much. It makes me a little scared. So maybe it’s maybe it’s a fear response. But I just thought there was nothing that needed to be done with it. And then David sparked these new concepts for me.
BenDavid Grabinski: I just thought it would be a waste of time, the idea of doing the same thing a fourth time. We’ve had the books, the movie, and the video game. I just say in terms of the time involvement of it, it’s like if we were going to spend a big chunk of our lives working on this, with these brilliant artists who are going to do the work to bring their approach to Scott Pilgrim, It just felt like a waste of time to not try and do something new… It just felt like if we could tell a new version of the story, that would be really exciting.
Was the shift in focus to Ramona always going to be the direction, or did that evolve during the development process?
BenDavi Grabinksi: The premise came from that idea… we were just talking about how it just would be great if there was a way to have Ramona drive the story more. I think the conclusion was well, you kind of need to take Scott out of the equation for a little bit in order to do that. I think that a lot of our creative choices came from the starting point, [It would be more] interesting to have Ramona driving a story more this time, instead of just being kind of working in service of Scott.
The other thing was that when I first read Scott Pilgrim, I was so surprised when the first fight happened. I think a lot of people were watching the movie, too. I think we wanted to have something happen that was equally surprising. Even if you’ve read the book a million times and seen the movie a million times, we wanted to create the same off-kilter feeling. It was the same feeling you had this as you did reading the books for the first time.
Bryan Lee O’Malley: Part of it is that switching to Ramona and removing Scott from the story for a while felt like the freshest way to do that. I always remember it in the first book… I didn’t have an audience and have fans at the time. So I was just like, ‘I gotta do something that pulled the rug out two-thirds of the way through the book.’ Something you don’t know is coming, necessarily. But now of course, you know, six books that were, 20 years ago? People have heard of it. There’s a movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve probably heard the premise. How can we build on that existing knowledge?
It’s not just Ramona who gets that shift in character focus, either. We see a lot of new shades of a lot of characters. Which one would you say surprised you the most while making Scott Pilgrim Takes Off?
Bryan Lee O’Malley: Gideon [Laughing].
BenDavi Grabinksi: My one-sentence idea was we should do the Trading Places Dan Ackroyd arc for Gideon.
Bryan Lee O’Malley: If the first thing is Matthew wins, okay, now Matthew will become the boss. Oh, so Gideon goes to the bottom. It’s like Trading Places. Then one day we were sitting here and I just threw out the name Gordon Goose. And we laughed so hard. It opened up the whole thing for us.
BenDavi Grabinksi: That was the most I laughed in the entire process. I already liked the idea of Gideon losing everything and then wanting to get it back and have his revenge. Then moving in with Julie — revealing that he had an entirely different persona and literal name before the main story, it was not a thing that we had ever planned on. The second that occurred to us, it made [the show] even more fun.
Bryan Lee O’Malley: That speech he gives at the end of the third episode is one of my favorite things in the whole show. It just takes place all in one long shot. Jason Schwartzman is so funny, and it was mostly BenDavid’s jokes.
BenDavi Grabinksi: My favorite joke I think I’ve ever written — or ever will write — is his McDonald’s joke. I could just retire after that, because I don’t think I’ll ever write another joke that I’ll be as stupidly proud of. It’s so dumb.
I’m just so happy it meant we got to see Gideon and Lucas Lee hanging out.
BenDavi Grabinksi: A lot of things start at a point of kind of movie references. We were talking about it, I really just wanted to a Step Brothers scene between Lucas Lee and Gideon
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Speaking of the show pairing the two of them, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off features plenty of unexpected pairings. Knives and Stephen, Gideon and Julie, Wallace and Todd. What was the process of developing those relationships?
BenDavi Grabinksi: I think we had an ethos to try and do those unlikely pairings or to build on things that are kind of hinted in the books like Knives and Steven have a budding friendship in the books. It was fun to explore that. Todd and Wallace came out of nowhere, It all came from throwing things together and see what works. Let’s see what’s new, what’s funny, and what makes the actors click. It’s the part of the creative process that is weirdly the simplest and the least magical. It’s just sitting in a room and talking about the characters and saying, ‘What if these people did this with these people?’
If the second you say to people and they get excited, then you know that something is worth chasing. You just sit and talk about the characters. There are ideas that we might have said that did not end up in the script, but everything that’s in the show are the ones where one of us would say it and we immediately got excited. It would be so funny if Todd was in love with Wallace and then Wallace didn’t actually love him back… The second both of us were excited about a pairing, we knew that was correct.
Bryan Lee O’Malley: With [Wallace and Todd], that was the big revelation. That Todd would be so devastated like that. Getting Brandon to perform all that stuff was just magical.
BenDavi Grabinksi: We specifically wrote that because we knew that [Brandon] would nail it. I’ve known Brandon for a very long time. I’ve worked with him a bunch. We both love it when he gets into goofy comedy mode. It felt correct for the character. We also knew if we got Brandon in the recording booth, he would just have so much fun playing that. I mean, it’s funny, but it’s also real. Fans have really responded to it. It was really nice to see that. What is Scott Pilgrim without heartbreak? I’ve always said, if anyone’s ever been in love, they have they have an entry point to the show.
Bryan, you’ve seen these characters reinvented across mediums over the last twenty years. How was seeing it brought to life in animation different than the experience of seeing it in live-action or in a videogame?
Bryan Lee O’Malley: I’m older now. I’m a producer. I’m jaded. There still were some very magical moments. I think it’s when I get reflected back to me in a foreign way. It really helped to see the characters in Japanese. That really blew me away. They got the greatest performers.
When we got our song, the opening number, it was quite an emotional moment. With all the songs we were constructing, as those scenes sort of came together… I could never do that in a comic with music, obviously. That was like a whole new field. The scenes came together so powerfully, I’m really proud of all that work we got to do.
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Let’s say there’s another continuation of Scott Pilgrim in the future. Which characters would you be most excited to return to?
Bryan Lee O’Malley: The show is a little light on a few people. I definitely wish we could have done a bit more with Kim Pine. If there are ever any future opportunities, I’m sure I would lean towards whatever is in my head, that I still think needs exploration, I would definitely like more Kim.
BenDavi Grabinksi: If I’m just talking about amusing myself, and my own sensibility and what makes me laugh… Lucas Lee is the easiest. It’s my love of action movies, it’s my love of Tony Hawk video games. It’s my love of all kinds of shit. The truth is, I like all these characters. I’m just grateful I got to do all this stuff with them. I don’t think there is a single character that isn’t fun and interesting.
Bryan Lee O’Malley: All the characters were equally interesting when I first came up with them. Over the years, they’ve accrued more personality. The actors, the casting, [Edgar Wright], and now obviously, BenDavid’s contributions. Then all these fan contributions, all the fan art I’ve seen since the show came out… It’s all been so overwhelming.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is now streaming on Netflix
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