Netflix Scott Pilgrim Anime’s Creators Talk Adapting the Comics

Earlier this month, at New York Comic Con, Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski sat down with io9 and a roundtable of journalists to discuss the upcoming anime, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Based off O’Malley’s graphic novels and reinventing the story that people fell in love with over and over again, the two spoke candidly about updating the show beyond nostalgia and what it took to get the band back together.

When O’Malley and Grabinski first started working on the show, they didn’t know that they would be able to get the same cast to voice their characters from the film. They eventually decided that, if they couldn’t get everyone on board, they shouldn’t use any of the previous cast. “We should just recast the whole thing because it would feel so weird to have almost everyone and then one person clangs,” said O’Malley. “We definitely talked about it, but fortunately they all said yes pretty early on.”

He went on to explain that “I think within 15, 20 minutes [of sending the first email], that at least one person responded like, ‘I’m in’.” Before we go too much further, you should know that every journalist was threatened, only semi-playfully, with some very angry emails should we reveal any spoilers. So, without Netflix PR threatening us into oblivion, this is about as much as we can tell you about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off!

The setting of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is unmoored from conventional restrictions of time and place. It’s Toronto. Sometime in 20XX. It takes place during Scott Pilgrim Time, actually. “Scott Pilgrim Time is a funny thing that Brian keeps saying,” said Grabinski, “because we both have different ideas about when this takes place… in my headcanon, I always think of Scott Pilgrim as like 2010, and I can’t even tell you why. So our idea of ‘Scott Pilgrim Time’ is somewhere in that big zone of like mid 2000 to 2010 ish. So we’ve just decided there’s A.D. and then Scott Pilgrim time and that’s when the show takes place.”

Grabinski also says that the show is very rooted in it’s era, even if it’s not tied down to a specific year. “I don’t know how these people would ever exist in a different time period. I think that so much of who they are and what they do and what their passions are comes from that time. I think that if you moved it to the present day, you’d have to rethink everything. And I don’t think I’m equipped to just figure out what Envy Adams would be in the age of TikTok.”

But just because Scott Pilgrim Time stayed the same (as much as Scott Pilgrim Time can stay the same), O’Malley knew that they’d have to update the story a little bit. “It definitely appealed to have more Ramona,” O’Malley said. “But not just Ramona. We wanted to try to get more of everyone, ironically, except for Scott… We found a way to kind of work with other characters a little bit more and to look at Scott from new angles.”

O’Malley described having had a college backstory for Ramona and Roxie that he had never been able to portray in the graphic novels. “That was something that I wanted to shoehorn in the show somehow.” Grabinski added that “we felt like we really had a good opportunity to just try to add more shading to [Ramona] and make her more complicated and interesting. And that was really one of the biggest North Stars for the project.”

There’s also the complicated issues of the villains; the seven evil exes that the plot, more or less, revolves around. “I could have done so much more with these [villains] in the books,” said O’Malley. So when he got the chance to give them a little more depth, he was eager to jump in. “When we kind of settled on the plot of this version, it really appealed to me to do those scenes and to have more villain scenes.”

Grabinski is excited for fans to see new sides of old characters. “It was very nice to have scenes that had characters together that you have not seen before… We really wanted to give Knives [Chau] some unexpected arcs that have nothing to do with her relationship with Scott. Some of my favorite stuff in the show involves her.” O’Malley was also excited for the scenes with Lucas Lee. “He was really like a standout. As we were writing the show, we were like, ‘Oh, we could write this character forever’.”

The ultimate goal of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was “to make the story legible to people who’ve never seen Scott Pilgrim or never read the books,” said O’Malley. “So the story beats are kind of still there, even though the story has been changed a lot. But ultimately I just had to put the books away after day one of writing… I didn’t want to be too beholden to them. I wanted to just feel the story as opposed to kind of like doing a transliteration of the books… I think any time you’re doing something like this, it’s just going to evolve in its own direction. And we really had to embrace that.”

The trick was to get into Scott Pilgrim Time. Back to the semi-mythical 20XX when the books take place. “What I had to do specifically was write the characters the way that I would have written the characters back then,” O’Malley said. “And try not to think about the actors and the fans and the whole everything that’s happened in the past 15 years.”

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will premiere on Netflix on November 17th, 2023 at 3:00 AM ET.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.