Bryan Lee O’Malley had been wanting to revisit the story of Scott Pigrim for “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” but wasn’t able to think of something fruitful or exciting to use to revisit the material. All of that changed while he was having dinner one evening with BenDavid Grabinski. “I thought what else could I do? Then one day I was having dinner with my friend BenDavid and he had some really kind of out of pocket ideas and we were joking around and it was all just kind of right and it became the show,” he tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: TV Animation panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). Grabinski adds that having Science Saru doing the animation for the show gave them more incentive to come up with different areas to cover with the story. “I came up with some very harebrained ideas as to how to shake things up and do a brand new version of the story that no one was expecting that would also give Science Saru an opportunity to do something that just didn’t feel like a cover.”
“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” is a reimagining of O’Malley’s graphic novels that served as the basis for the 2010 Edgar Wright film “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” that is streaming on Netflix. Like the source material, the story centers around Scott (Michael Cera), a bass-player in an indie band who falls in love with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Scott finds out that in order to date Ramona, he must defeat all seven of her evil ex-boyfriends. An unfortunate incident during the first fight is where the series parts ways with the book and movie and drastically alters the lives of everyone involved. In addition to Cera and Winstead, the show sees Satya Bhabha, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Mae Whitman and Alison Pill reprise their characters from the film.
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Even with having the original actors from the 2010 film, O’Malley and Grabinski both found themselves being surprised by the performances they got out of someo of them. “Johnny Simmons, who played Young Neil, I remember he was just on Zoom and he was in a tiny little window and I just remember him cracking us all up from that tiny little window all day,” O’Malley says. For Grabinski, it was Ellen Wong who voiced Knives Chau that really caught him offguard. “I knew she’d be good but she had zero animation experience and she was doing everything at a thousand miles per hour and brought so much personality and energy to the character that I just thought was incredibly additive and she just had such a great attitude.”
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