Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Showrunners on Why the Netflix Anime Is More Than Just the Greatest Hits [IGN]

“It’s like, we spent a decade [hoping for it], I wouldn’t have thought it would ever happen for that decade,” said Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley in an interview with IGN. “And then suddenly it happened, so here we are.”

It’s been 13 years since Scott Pilgrim shot to stardom with the release of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World starring Michael Cera as the twenty-something slacker from Toronto, Canada. The graphic novels have been around even longer still, making their debut with Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life back in 2004.

Now, almost 20 years after the first book, Scott is back, with Netflix announcing back in March that it was developing a Scott Pilgrim anime with the entire voice cast from the live-action movie returning. That includes Cera, Brie Larson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Evans, and a whole lot more.

And with two decades since the first book, O’Malley has the benefit of a whole lot more life experience to Scott’s tale.

“It’s still a show about being in your twenties, and being in love, and making mistakes, and growing up, and getting in fights, but with the perspective of being made by adults,” said co-showrunner BenDavid Grabinski. “And when Bryan wrote and drew those books, he was in his twenties and he was just on that adventure of being an adult, but not really being an adult. And now he’s lived with the books for 20 years, and the movie, and the video game, and we’ve both grown up a lot, and the goal is to make something just as fun, and silly, and stupid, and weird, and energetic, and youthful, but hopefully with something new to say.”

What they came up with is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off – a new show that propels Scott Pilgrim to even dizzier heights. Once again, Scott Pilgrim takes on the evil exes of his potential love interest, Ramona Flowers… but the show is more than just a replay of the greatest hits.

While some of the beats may feel familiar, O’Malley and Grabinski have come up with a new way of exploring Scott’s story, and it was crucial for them to keep doing something fresh.

“It was Bryan, I think, from having told the same story a bunch and been living with it for so long, I think he was viewing it as a box, and I was a huge fan and I’m a little insane when it comes to how I try to think about adaptations,” said Grabinski. “And the second I came up with a really big hook, Bryan loved it, and then we had to add a hundred new hooks after that… and then we both spent years just trying to make sure that the show kept constantly reinventing itself and never settling for the obvious way forward.”

Scott Pilgrim Moves Forward

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off sits in a unique space between what came before – the novels, the movie, and the popular video game. Both Malley and Grabinski agree, however, that it remains its own thing.

“I think we mostly focused on character and let the other stuff fall into place,” said O’Malley. “A lot of the references back to the film and the game came from [animation studio] Science Saru and came pretty late stage in the creation, which is how it always was in the comics as well. I would write a whole story and then when I’m drawing it, I’d get bored and I start adding references, and I start adding things like that. So that made a lot of sense to me. But yeah, in the script stage, we have some big references, we have some big callbacks, but a lot of it was just peppered in.”

“You find opportunities to bring things in you love from all these other things, including other adaptations of it,” added Grabinski. “Because I’m a huge fan of every version of the story, and sometimes there’s just a fun opportunity where you’re thinking of something a character could do that fits at this place in the story, and then you think, oh, well, what if we also bring in a reference to this? Or what if we do this?”

The result is a show that feels like a very natural extension of the Scott Pilgrim story. But yes, there are tons of pop culture references too. As Grabinski puts it, “you can’t do Scott Pilgrim without incorporating pop culture.”

“There’s references to some movies that I love with my whole heart that almost nobody knows, but just fortunately, there’s a really funny way to incorporate elements of that that is also fitting into what we’re doing,” he said. “There’s some subplots with characters and stuff that we wanted them to do that felt right, and then sometimes they dovetail with a movie that we love that has a similar thing, so it ends up being a fortunate coincidence…. I like that it gets that nuts, and sometimes we just comment on it in really dumb ways that hopefully no one will expect.”

One thing we shouldn’t expect, though, is to see Scott Pilgrim Takes Off adapted into a graphic novel.

O’Malley insisted that Takes Off has been very much designed to be a TV show, and there’s admittedly a lot of aspects that wouldn’t translate onto the page quite as well.

“It’s so designed for the format,” he explained. “I intentionally was trying to write a lot of things that I could never write in a comic. Music-based scenes just wouldn’t work the same way as the comic. I tried to embrace the format. I think Scott Pilgrim has always embraced the format of each of its different adaptations. So that was a big goal here. And yeah, I don’t think you could do it, the same way I wouldn’t want to do the books word for word as this series, I wouldn’t want to do this series word for word as a book.”

The Return of the Cast

Ever since Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was announced, one of the big pulls has been the return of the movie’s cast to reprise their beloved characters. It’s especially surprising since some of those stars – like MCU actors Evans and Larson in particular – have gotten pretty darn busy in the past 13 years.

Both O’Malley and Grabinski think it wouldn’t have worked without them – every one of them.

“It felt amazing,” said O’Malley. “It was one of the greatest days ever and continued to be the greatest days ever as we got to work with each of them. I think it was so important, but we started to feel like if even one person said no, we might have to say let’s recast the entire thing, because it would just feel so wrong to have one of the family members replaced. It would just feel so wrong. And it would collapse the magic of what we were trying to do in bringing this back to life whole cloth.”

“So, every show, every movie is kind of a miracle, and I think this one is more miraculous than some, and I hope people can appreciate that,” he went on. “I think people take it a bit for granted, which is a little bit frustrating, because it’s crazy that we got this to happen.”

“I truly never for a single second thought that I was going to get the cast, and then we did, and we just were super excited about it enhanced the whole thing,” said Grabinski. “And I think that once people watch it, they can tell that the actors really went for it because there’s a lot of new stuff to do, and I think that everybody was so game, and I’m really, really happy with their performances.”

Ultimately, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is 100% one for the fans. And after all this time, the duo can’t wait to see what they think – if also a little nervous.

“Yeah, we are excited and scared,” said O’Malley. “But I think the thing is there were many changes [from the books to the film], but that’s all back then now. So, to anyone coming to it now, it’s all set in stone. It’s part of history and to change it might be sacrilege to some of them… What we want to hear is, ‘Oh, it feels like Scott Pilgrim,’ because it does to me.”

“We were always hoping that by the time people got to episode two, they’d realized that this is more than they could have hoped for, but who the fuck knows?” said Grabinski. “…We just try to do our best. I was thinking about the audience at every moment of it, but I’ve given up on knowing exactly how people are going to feel. All I know is that to me, it feels 100% like Scott Pilgrim, even when it’s new Scott Pilgrim.”

“Yeah, I’m willing for it to be polarizing because ultimately this was the only way I could do it,” said O’Malley. “There was one path and it was this path. It very much inspired me, and I think the work speaks to that. But if you’re dying to see one passage from a particular volume and it’s not here and you’re upset, then that’s your life, I guess.”

“If the only thing that was going to make you happy is just a direct adaptation of the books, then I was never going to be able to make anybody happy,” said Grabinski. “But as a huge fan of Scott Pilgrim myself, I’m grateful that I got to tell this version of it, and I’m just glad it exists and I hope people like it as much as I do.”

As for whether or not we get more Scott Pilgrim, we’ll have to wait and see.

“Oh, not currently,” said O’Malley about the possibility of more Scott Pilgrim books. “But you never know anymore, so I would never say no. Someday it might come back in book format, I’m sure.”

“Bryan never planned on making an anime of it,” said Grabinski. “So, I don’t think plans are a good idea.”

“Yeah, I don’t really plan so much,” added O’Malley.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off launches on Netflix on Nov. 17.

Want to read more about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off? Check out the official Scott Pilgrim Takes Off trailer as well as the show’s first clip that teases a new take on Ramona’s delivery job.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.