You’ve seen the movie, you’ve seen the comic books, and yes, things have changed. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off starts almost identical to the story we know, and then at the very end of the first episode, when Scott gets his first challenge against Matthew Patel, he loses. I was like, “What are you doing?”
Baby Know-It-All is with me on this one. She’s read the comics, we’ve both watched the movie (we watch it a lot in this house, we kind of use it as white noise), and I played the video game a long time ago. She didn’t know there was a video game.
Her out-of-the-theater reaction was that it was really good and it took a turn she wasn’t expecting. The anime looks a lot like the comic book, with little tweaks. She loved that they brought everyone back, that the voices all line up, and that the characters look like their actors. Her words: “I’m looking at an animated Michael Cera.”
Remember, I’m the older guy here. It took me a second to get used to the pivot. The story starts like it’s going to run in line with the normal one, and then it shifts real fast. Baby took it as an alternate dimension, and that’s exactly what it is.
Matthew Patel Wins, and Then He Wins Again
The first episode is “Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life,” and the story pivots the second Scott loses. Episode two is “A League of Their Own,” and you get to see the bad guys, the League of Evil Exes.
Gideon sits them all down at a dinner table, and Matthew, now high on the win, says, “I defeated Scott Pilgrim, and she still didn’t go out with me. What’s going on?” So he challenges Gideon. Gideon puts it all on the line, and Matthew Patel wins. That blew me away too, because he’s the lowest ranked ex. He takes over Gideon’s business, his CEO empire, the whole nine yards.
I never realized they ranked them. I just assumed the numbers were the order in which Ramona dated them. Baby didn’t know either.
It’s also the first time we really get to see his demon hipster chicks, and they were pretty good. The CGI wasn’t bad either. He has this cool power where he grows these spirit arms and can fight with multiple pairs of arms. I don’t know if that’s a Hindu thing or not. Remember, in the movie he’s singing about Vishnu and the whole thing. All I know is he whips out these other arms and starts fighting, and he’s pretty awesome.
Ramona Goes Looking
Episode three is “Ramona Rents a Video.” It starts with Ramona having had a dream. She’s in that same brain highway, the shortcut through Scott’s brain, which shouldn’t exist if he’s dead, and she can faintly hear his voice. So she’s convinced he’s still alive somewhere, and she’s on a mission.
She tracks down the video cassette from the nightclub, and she sees that Scott got sucked into what looked like a vegan portal. These are words I never thought I would say. Now she’s determined to find out who kidnapped him.
She takes the tape to the video store to show Kim. Baby wanted to know where the heck Kim’s coworker came from. She’s a character in the comic books. She’s all right.
While they’re at the store, Roxie shows up, and you get this really dope fight. Part of me wishes there were more fights, but the ones we got were really good. They’ve got the voice guy too, so it’s “Roxie versus Ramona Flowers.” There’s a really fun moment where Kim can’t decide whether she wants to kiss her or not, and she does, and they share a moment. Then Ramona’s like, “Yeah, you’ve got to go.” But Ramona and Roxie make up. It was healing. Baby’s point was that we get a more in-depth backstory of Ramona and the exes here, and she’s right.
Take Scott Out and Everybody Else Shows Up
It’s funny. Having removed Scott from the picture, you suddenly find there’s all this depth in all these characters, and I think that was honestly the point. I think that was Edgar Wright’s point in helping put this whole concept together: how do we show the greater depth in these characters than they had before?
Ramona suddenly has a lot of personality that she didn’t have before. Kim briefly recaps the origin story of her and Scott, which is when he fights the 50-foot purple giant to save her from a band of ninjas or whatever. And Wallace is off the chain in this. He talks so much. Wallace is a character, let’s say that.
I know that Bryan Lee O’Malley said in an interview that he had a hard time with the character of Ramona for a long time in the comics. How do you represent her, how do you do her justice, because obviously he’s a man trying to write a woman. Removing Scott was the key to unlocking her character, as well as magically finding voices for all the other characters. I think that was really important.
The Movie Inside the Show
In episode four, “Whatever,” Ramona heads to the film set to see Lucas. She’s checking each of the evil exes to see which of them may have been involved in Scott’s demise, or in the faking of it.
Why is a movie being made? Young Neil has apparently written a screenplay. He thinks his sleep paralysis demon wrote it, for real, because he wakes up and sees someone sitting at his desk writing the thing. And it’s the movie we’ve seen. It’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I thought that was very, very cool.
Lucas is playing Scott Pilgrim, which is hilarious. Ramona’s standing there saying this isn’t how things went down, and it’s all the lines we know from the movie. Envy Adams is playing Ramona, and Ramona is her stunt double. They fired the guy who played Wallace so Wallace could play Wallace.
By the way, everybody’s voicing their own characters and they all sound amazing. Brie Larson totally rechannels that original Envy Adams voice.
“So, are you a fan of Sex Bob-Omb?”
“No, I’m kind of seeing someone in the band.”
“That’s crazy. I am, too.”
Nobody’s gotten out of sync. They do feel a hair older than their animated counterparts should sound, but otherwise I’m okay. And Ellen Wong, who plays Knives Chau, is dead on. If she’s not voicing anime, she should be. She knows how anime is supposed to be voiced.
Lucas ends up out of the picture, and the paparazzi ninjas are in the middle of it. Paparazzi ninjas are the best, because that’s how all those punks are in real life as far as I’m concerned.
So Todd ends up playing Scott. That’s episode five, “Lights. Camera. Sparks?!” You have Todd, Envy and Wallace in a scene, and because Envy and Todd can’t keep their hands off each other, Wallace has the brilliant idea to talk to the director, Edgar Wright, about changing the scene up. Sure enough, he’s got Todd and Wallace making out. Todd feels a spark and Wallace feels nothing. Envy gets upset, Todd has a whole drama, and he’s so heartbroken over Wallace that he stops being vegan and loses his vegan powers. It’s awful.
Neither of them had anything to do with Scott. They had no idea.
Goose, Julie, and a Knock at the Door
So Ramona pins it down: it must be Gideon and Julie. By this point we’ve found out Gideon is from Toronto and his name used to be Goose. Something Goose. He was such a nerd in school, and he used to wear these No Fear t-shirts, which back in the ’90s was totally a thing. That’s kind of what propelled him into becoming something, because he figured, “Well, clearly I’m the guy with no fear.” Julie went to high school with them and dated him back then.
Meanwhile Knives and Stephen Stills have become fond of each other. They’re writing music, and they somehow get involved with Matthew Patel after he fires everyone from the movie. There’s also a random robot running around. In the very beginning it looks like a robot the Katayanagis built, and you don’t know anything more.
When they confront Julie and Gideon, Julie’s very much like, he’s a loser. Apparently she wants to be evil too, and what attracted her to him was that he had aspirations. Now he sits at home with Lucas playing video games and wrecking her house. It’s pretty funny.
And at the very end of that episode, there’s a knock at the door. Scott’s back.
Ten Years in the Future
That brings us to episode seven, the penultimate episode, and if you know anything about this channel, we love us some penultimate episodes. It’s called “2 Scott 2 Pilgrim,” and you finally get his story.
By the way, Ramona figured out everything. He confirms it: you were right, but you’re wrong about who. They made a vegan robot who never eats, and that’s what made the portal. The robot is from the twins and Scott, ten years in the future.
Older Scott has brought younger Scott to the future because he and Ramona have split. They got divorced, the whole bit. So he wants young Scott to not date her. That’s why everything changed.
“When me and Ramona were having problems, you said, ‘Too bad I don’t have a time machine so I can go back and stop myself from dating her in the first place.’”
“Buddy, I was obviously joking.”
That’s why this is a different story. That’s what Baby meant when she said alternate universe. I dug the concept, especially because you get to see older Wallace, who’s still a lech, only now he has white hair. He’s rich because he has a rich husband that he never sees. Everybody looks exactly the same, by the way.
Older Scott’s really in rough shape. Baby’s review: “Oh, he’s annoying. I didn’t like him.” Will Forte voices him, and he played Abraham Lincoln on Clone High.
Older Ramona uses her time-traveling rollerblades, which were made from old spare parts of a DeLorean. When she goes 88 miles per hour, she time travels. She puts young Scott in her interdimensional purse, the same one her giant hammer comes out of, and takes him back to the past. She had discovered older Scott’s plan and decided she wasn’t going to let it happen. She’s the one who got Young Neil to keep a journal of what had happened and helped him turn it into a script. Old Young Neil.
There’s one thing we almost forgot, and Baby caught it. When Scott’s in the future there’s a VR set, and through it he’s controlling the robot in the past. So the thing following everyone around the whole time is Scott, trying to see what in the hell was going on. That sets up a really wonderful, heartfelt moment where older Ramona says she failed, and he tells her, I don’t know about you, but the version I saw was fighting hard looking for me. That was good.
The World vs. Scott Pilgrim
Back in the present, Scott and Ramona are finally together. They go to kiss, and there’s a force field preventing them from kissing. Old Scott told our Scott he’d do anything to keep him from getting with Ramona. He’s a punk. He is really the worst.
Clearly someone still has it out for him, so they go to the opening of the musical that Knives and Stephen put together, with Matthew Patel as the main character of Scott, which is hilarious. This whole thing is so convoluted. They question everybody, and everybody’s chill. The Katayanagis are chill because the robot told them that in the future they’re bros. The exes aren’t really evil anymore, because events have changed.
Then the entire front of the theater explodes, and all of them are transported into the far future, a wasteland where they have to fight an even older Scott. This one’s ripped and huge and gray bearded. The final episode is called “The World vs. Scott Pilgrim,” and his whole thing is, if I can’t get you to stop, I’m going to take all of you out so none of this happens.
It’s kind of epic. Amazing fight scene, and everybody’s involved.
Finally old Ramona shows up, and she’s got long hair now. She’s 20 years in the future and more than over him. She explains that all of this happened because Scott got depressed and assumed stuff, and she asks him, why didn’t you ever try to win me back? Then the Ramonas come to terms. She loves herself, they merge, and they become this Super Saiyan Sonic Ramona, a little orb, floaty Ramona. She sends much older Scott back where he came from. She tells our Scott that the things she loves, she tends to run away from. Everything gets reset back to normal, and they finally get to move on. You get this big, giant, wonderful happy ending.
Gideon and Julie had a plot to blow up the theater, and the demon hipster chicks saved the day and stopped it. The very end button is that big room of screens, and now there are two chairs. I believe Gideon and Julie are going to be the villains of a second season.
What They Kept From the Movie and the Comics
We got to hear a lot of the lines from the movie. Knives says “chow down.” Baby loved the “bread makes you fat” one, which they just slip in while they’re randomly doing the song.
The Sonic one was amazing. The movie changed that whole story to Pac-Man, but in the comics it always was the Sonic idea.
Baby pointed out that Ramona dyes her hair at the beginning of every episode, and I love that they took the time to do that. She’s a Ramona fan page all day.
The animation really felt like the comic books, down to the way the environment looks. Netflix animation did a really good job with this. And even though they’re being the characters, the characters started to look and feel like the actors who were voicing them, which I thought was cool.
We didn’t get much, if any, of the songs from the movie, and it’s probably a rights issue or something. But we got a lot of new ones and a lot of good music. I love both of the Scott Pilgrim soundtracks, the score and the actual music they played, and this is definitely another one. And Knives joins the band at the end, on keyboard. She’s very cool.
The Verdict
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a solid 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and that’s from both of us.
It was really good. I went into this thinking it was going to be more or less a close retelling of the comics. It wasn’t, and I’m okay with that. I really like what they did.
My favorite episode was probably the penultimate one. I liked the look at the future, I loved the DeLorean jab, and it’s where you finally understand what’s going on. Baby liked the second episode the most, because she feels like it set the tone for everything that came after. That’s fair.
I hope they get enough attention to do a second season, because it’s a new world now. It isn’t the same world. Baby doesn’t know what you could do with a second season. I think Gideon and Julie should get a new adventure, a new story. She asked why it would still be called Scott Pilgrim. Because they’re the bad guys, and these are clearly the good guys.
If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it.
Tell us what you thought. What was your favorite episode, what translated well from the story you knew, and what parts didn’t you like so much? Be respectful to each other and to your hosts, because we love talking with y’all. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
