 This video contains major spoilers for pretty much every incarnation of Scott Pilgrim, the comic, the new anime, and two different versions of the film. It does not contain spoilers for the end of the game because the game is really hard, and I've never actually finished it. The new Scott Pilgrim takes off anime has fixed Scott Pilgrim, or at least that's the take that is bouncing around in certain circles of the internet, the idea that the new anime has somehow sanded off some of the edges and made the idea of Scott Pilgrim in general feel a little bit more appropriate for the I remember reading an article all the way back in the Stone Age of 2010 when Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the live-action film, came out which claimed that Scott Pilgrim was essentially Twilight for Boys. This was at a time when anything to do with Twilight was considered to be the greatest insult that you could possibly throw at a thing. The logic was apparently that just as Twilight is wish-fulfillment romance for girls, Scott Pilgrim is wish-fulfillment romance for boys. You get to date the manic pixie dream girl, and you also get to beat up all of her exes. And I think this probably misunderstands the whole point of Scott Pilgrim in a fairly major way. Indeed, I feel that a lot of people who have only ever seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World the film will not necessarily get the concept of Scott Pilgrim as it's presented in other media. To this end, while Scott Pilgrim the anime certainly recontextualizes a lot of Scott Pilgrim tropes, it does so in a way that doesn't necessarily contradict the core message of the original comics. Which is to say, the comics themselves were always fairly self-aware, Scott Pilgrim was never meant to be a role model. There are certain elements that you lose when a book series is converted into a single film. Indeed, Scott Pilgrim vs The World the film points this out specifically, with the character Comeo on point pointing out that the book is always better than the film. And whether or not that's always true is up for debate, but certainly when you're taking six fairly chunky volumes of a comic series and trying to squish them down into two hours, you don't necessarily manage to translate all of the nuance of the story. So in the case of Scott Pilgrim vs The World the film, the focus is very much on the fights. Scott has to defeat each and every single X before he is able to win Ramona. And that does come across as a bit of a uncomfortable concept in 2020 to 2023, whatever year we're in now. Really? Is it 2024 already? Wow. To a lot of people, this is not the biggest deal in the world and doesn't necessarily get in the way of enjoying the film because, I mean, it's very well directed, it looks gorgeous, it's incredibly stylish, and ultimately there are significantly worse films from Hollywood which have far more uncomfortable morals at their centre. Nevertheless, the plot of the film is essentially Scott Pilgrim has to defeat a series of evil Xs in order to win the prize that is Ramona. This is not the plot of the comic in the same way. And indeed, even in the film, there are glimpses at the idea that the fights are not necessarily as important as they may seem on an initial viewing. So in case you're watching this video without any prior knowledge of Scott Pilgrim, and if that's the case, thank you very much for watching, it is very much appreciated, Scott Pilgrim is a series of comics which were created by Brian the O'Malley in the early 2000s. O'Malley took a significant amount of inspiration from video game pop culture, because it was the early 2000s, that's what indie comics were at the time. Certainly, if you'd read any web comic at the time, you would have seen a video game pop culture comic. Also inspired by manga and by music that he liked, O'Malley came up with the idea of Scott Pilgrim, a character who, in order to date the girl of his dreams, has to defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends. By the time the film adaptation had rolled around, this was changed to evil exes for reasons that will be very clear if you look at the roster of characters that Scott Pilgrim has to defeat. Thus, despite being a comic, Scott Pilgrim has always been all about the video game experience, and the idea of filtering an entire worldview through the lens of video games. One thing that's particularly interesting about this is the fact that Scott Pilgrim was actually semi-autobiographical, based on O'Malley's own life, particularly his dating history. He has later stated that the idea of a league of evil exes came from discussions with his at-the-time girlfriend, Hope Larson, who is, by the way, herself also an incredible comic artist, very, very well-renowned. She's brilliant. Before dating, O'Malley Larson had dated several boys named Matthew, and O'Malley, taking this information in, processed it and thought, wouldn't it be interesting if I had to defeat all of these evil Matthews in order to win the heart of my girlfriend? Initially, all of the ex-boyfriends were going to be named Matthew, which is quite a fun idea, and I have to say, as a Matthew myself, I appreciate the idea that just all Matthews are evil. It's also worth pointing out that I am the third Matthew, that Bretton Stripes the usual voice for this channel has dated, so she's got some evil ex-Matthews as well. Let's put a pin in the idea of me then relating very hard to this, and also being a potential evil ex-Matthew and myself, because we will be coming back to that. There were other elements that O'Malley took from his life as well, his band, his friends, everything just kind of got mushed up together and turned into Scott Pilgrim, and according to O'Malley, not everybody was particularly thrilled to see that come out in comic form, and indeed ultimately in film form. O'Malley later said, I took some of my friends to the Scott Pilgrim premiere in Toronto, and it was so awkward. They left without saying anything at the end, no comments. It's a weird life making stories, especially with Scott Pilgrim, because it was so close to our lives at the time. We all had different versions of the things we were experiencing, and to see my version on big screen, it was very uncomfortable for some people. Now this I feel is a significant part of understanding the Scott Pilgrim experience, this idea that this was genuinely the lens through which Brian Lee O'Malley saw a lot of his life at the time. If you look at the Scott Pilgrim comics, ignore the film, ignore the anime, ignore every other adaptation of this work for the moment, but if you just look at the comics, Scott is not a great role model, and his way of viewing the world is fundamentally flawed. So the initial idea was that Brian Lee O'Malley was working mentally through the idea that his girlfriend at the time had a romantic past. And in order to process that in a way that made sense to him in adding this video game lens, the whole logic of Scott Pilgrim, essentially, is that Scott Pilgrim feels like he needs to prove himself as superior to his girlfriend's ex-boyfriends slash ex-girlfriend. Like that's the whole point of the work, is that Scott needs to prove to himself that he is worthy to date Ramona, because if you look at the comics, Ramona has almost no interest in the actual fights. For Scott's second fight with Lucas Lee, Ramona doesn't even bother to turn up, it's not important to her, she does not care. Prior to Scott's fight with Roxy Richter, Ramona has spent the night at Roxy's house, has made out with her apparently a little bit, clearly has absolutely no skin in the game in terms of who is going to win this fight. This is only something that matters to Scott. And it is worth pointing out by the way that according to Brian Lee O'Malley, while it's not mentioned in the text, his idea was that once you get defeated as an evil ex, you do just regenerate later, like you come back to life, it's fine, like you don't actually have to worry, it's not a permanent thing. The Scott Pilgrim comics then are a little bit about fighting and a lot about relationships, and specifically about the idea of learning from the past and trying to better yourself and improve yourself. At the start of the story, Scott is jobless, he is freeloading off a friend, and in order to make up for the big ex that has left his life, he is having a romantic relationship of sorts with a teenage girl. The whole point is, at the start of the story, Scott has a lot of work to do on himself, and the impetus, the motivation for making changes in his life and trying to improve himself, is Ramona. In order to make himself more appealing to Ramona, in volume 4, Scott gets a job, and is very pleased with himself, and then completely forgets to brag about this later, because actually the process of making himself better is in and of itself fulfilling. Or maybe he just genuinely forgot, I don't know. Similarly, Ramona is a tremendously nuanced character, and she has plenty of flaws herself. I don't love this idea that she's often characterized as a manic pixie dream girl, because for one thing, what even is that? Is that just like a girl with a quirky sense of fashion style? Ramona's big problem is that she doesn't like to stick things out when a relationship gets difficult. She will immediately move on, and that's reflected in her eclectic list of exes. When we first meet her, she has fled to the country to avoid her ex-boyfriend, Gideon Graves, and is living in Toronto instead of New York where she was previously, so that she can get a complete fresh start. She's not interested in looking at her past, and then it turns out that her past is coming to look for her. Looking at these comics from Ramona's point of view, you get a very different experience. This idea that a girl is just trying to move on with her life, she's trying to do something new, she's trying to be a different person, and every time she tries that, everyone from her past just comes and drags her back to where she was before. To this end, Scott and Ramona suit each other quite well, because Scott genuinely doesn't tend to learn from his mistakes in romance either. He has hurt all of his previous girlfriends, including Kim Pine, by ditching her and not telling her that he was moving away as a teenager. When he's more interested in dating Ramona than the teenage schoolgirl he's been spending time with, we see him break Knives Chow's heart, and we see him also immediately move on from this. It does not take him any time at all to reassert himself and feel comfortable again. Like, there is a moment of feeling guilt, and then it is gone, because that's just how Scott rolls. The big shadow over Scott in the first half of the comic series is his relationship with Envy Adams, aka Natalie, his ex-girlfriend who broke his heart so spectacularly that he essentially fell apart. And in later volumes it's made clear that no, actually, things weren't as one-sided as Scott believes. Initially, we just get Scott's side of the story, and he claims that Envy Adams, for no reason, just destroyed him, that she transformed overnight into a different person and left his heart broken by the wayside. Maybe it was his haircut. That's the only thing he can think of that might have suddenly caused her to turn on him. When we later get Envy's side of the story, she says that no, Scott was no saint either, that the breakup was not necessarily as one-sided as we initially believe. The true final fight of the comic, much as we later see in the film, is a moment where Scott has to face himself, head on, has to come to terms with his own darker side and to stop running away from his past, where he has to suddenly remember everything and appreciate that he's genuinely made some mistakes, and he needs to improve, and he needs to work on himself to make things better. Then he goes and fights Gideon, so we all get the closure of seeing the entire series wrapped up. I mean, that's kind of, you know, it had to happen, it had to happen. Meanwhile, Ramona has realised that she can't just run away from a relationship any time it begins to get boring or dull or stale, or any time that she doesn't feel quite right. The two of them hold hands and walk off into the sunset together, with an awareness that the relationship might not last forever. After all, they've already had several quite rocky patches, but they are genuinely committed to giving it another try, and they're going to enjoy it for as long as it lasts. It is a somewhat ambiguous ending. It doesn't say that they're going to be together forever, it doesn't say that they're going to fall apart immediately again, it just says, Scott and Ramona, they're going to try. And as an ambiguous ending for a comic, it's pretty good, because it gives you what you want, which is to see the two lovebirds get together, but it doesn't overly simplify things, and it doesn't claim that fairy tale romances are going to live happily ever after, because this ain't a fairy tale romance. The message of Scott Pilgrim the comics, then, is that we are all of us flawed individuals, we all of us have baggage from our past, we all of us have things that have gone wrong in our lives beforehand, and it is only by accepting those things that we have done before, accepting our own mistakes and the way that people have hurt us, that we are able to improve ourselves and change and grow. To this end, Scott's journey to defeat Ramona's evil exes is less about winning a human-shaped prize, and more about accepting that Ramona is a human being, and that she has a past, there have been people in her life before, and that Scott is not the centre of her universe. Indeed, I would argue that perhaps the best parts of Scott Pilgrim the comic are the parts that are nothing to do with the fights whatsoever. The fights, as I say, are a tiny part of a much larger romantic story. I swear I'm getting to the anime, I am getting there, hold your horses. Before I talk about the anime, I think it's time for us to talk a little bit about the film adaptation, what works and what doesn't work, and what needed fixing in this that may not have needed fixing in the comics. So the story goes that Brian Leo Malley finishes the first volume of Scott Pilgrim. Scott Pilgrim's precious little life, hands it to his publisher Oni Press, they print about a thousand of them, which is, you know, a decent number for an indie comic, but it's never going to take the whole world by storm, and then Brian Leo Malley carries on with his day job and starts working on Volume 2. One copy of that initial print run, through circuitous and random means, ends up in the hands of Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead. Wright was already a rising star in the UK. I remember the premiere for Hot Fuzz being like a big deal at the time, like everybody in the cinema dressed up in police gear to go to it, so we already knew that Wright was going to be a significant director for many years to come, but I don't think he'd quite gained the same worldwide notoriety that he has today. Either way, Wright absolutely loved Scott Pilgrim and decided that he wanted to adapt it into a film. There was just one problem, there was only one volume of it, and the story wasn't finished yet. It takes a while to get the ball rolling on a big-budget film, and as such, there was plenty of time for Brian Leo Malley to go away and do a couple more volumes of Scott Pilgrim, while at the same time Wright was working on Hot Fuzz and other stuff before they were able to come together to make Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Right from the beginning, though, when there was just that first volume of the comic, Edgar Wright was already coming up with his idea of what a big-budget live-action Scott Pilgrim film would look like. That does go some way to explaining the direction that he takes with the film and with the story, and his decision to make Ramona perhaps a less appealing character than she is in the comics compared with knives. The original ending for Edgar Wright, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, the live-action film, involves Scott at the very last second, realizing that no, actually, he's more into knives than he is into Ramona. He has better chemistry with knives, he's a more interesting character, and so he ultimately decides to end the film with knives instead of with Ramona, the woman that he has been battling all of these exiles in order to date. It certainly is interesting that Wright read the first volume of Scott Pilgrim and really shipped Scott knives, where kind of the whole point of the story of Scott moving from dating a teenager to dating a woman his own age is the idea of him growing in maturity and finally moving on from his big breakup. Nevertheless, test audiences were not particularly keen on this direction. After all, Scott had spent two hours fighting for Ramona, and it felt odd for him to suddenly not want Ramona anymore. And so, as a result, a new ending was filmed in which Scott and Ramona dance off into the sunset together. Apparently, Edgar Wright was a little bit apprehensive about explaining all of this to Ellen Wong, the actor who plays Knives Chow. He had to essentially tell her, sorry, you're not the romantic lead of the film anymore. You were, now you're not. In response to this, though, she actually said, no, that makes sense. I don't think Knives would take Scott back that quickly anyway. Which, yeah, I like that. That's true. And it led to the line, I'm too cool for you anyway, which is what she says when she breaks up with Scott. It does make for a much nicer arc for Knives' journey within the film, with her starting off absolutely idolizing Scott and thinking he's the best thing in the world and then slowly learning that actually he isn't all that great and suddenly realizing that no, she can do better and indeed she is just cooler anyway. The downside to this is that because the film was supposed to be leading audiences to want Scott to get together with Knives, Ramona's characterization is very different from the comics. In the comics, she's fun, she likes to joke, she has a good time playing around with Scott, they have great chemistry together. In the film, there's not spectacular chemistry between Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead and it feels like a lot of that is deliberate because you're not supposed to want these two to get together. What this results in is a film where Scott Pilgrim is attempting to date a woman and indeed fight all of this woman's exes to rescue her somehow, but she doesn't seem like she's particularly interested in him. This isn't necessarily a fault of anybody involved in the project, it's just how it turned out because of that last minute change to the ending. The result of this though is that if people have only seen the film, Scott Pilgrim, they tend to malign Ramona as being a little bit more than a cardboard cutout, just a kind of a lamp to be put on a pedestal, something for Scott to idolize and work towards but that who doesn't have any kind of depth or character herself. The prospect then of an anime adaptation of the comics seemed like an excellent opportunity to fix Ramona in particular and give her the more well-rounded character that she really should have had to do her justice in a moving picture scenario. It's worth pointing out that because Scott Pilgrim the film was being worked on at the same time as Scott Pilgrim the comics, there is a point where instead of the film being based on the comics, the film came up with its own story and the comics are instead influenced by the film. Brian Leomali, as for example, said about this panel of Scott being dead, which appears in the comic, was initially lifted from the film because he had seen it and he thought it looked really cool in the film so he was like, all right, I'll just put that in my comic as well. As a result it is difficult to separate the line between where Brian Leomali's ideas end and Edgar Wright and the rest of the production team for the film's ideas begin. They're kind of all nebulous mushed up mess, which is absolutely fine because all versions of this are fun in some way or other. Some of them have strength and some of them have weaknesses, but all of it is fun. It's just a little bit more fun, at least for me if we don't think of Ramona as just being a prize that Scott has won at the end of the film. I'm going to be honest with you, I find it very easy to give Scott Pilgrim the benefit of the doubt because I absolutely adore the comics. That's probably come across by this point. I donated the original versions of these, the black and white ones that I bought in 2010 to my little brother when these came out because I figured, oh, color, color is better, right? And to a certain extent there are some jokes that I feel work better in the black and white. And also to a certain extent I feel like, especially in some of the later volumes, you can really appreciate the gorgeous line art in black and white in a way that you can't quite the same way in color, but hey, it's still all good. I first came across Scott Pilgrim the comics in much the same way that I think a lot of people did at the time. There was a trailer for Scott Pilgrim versus the World of the Film. I watched it, I thought, that's brilliant. I want to see more of this. Why don't I try out the comics that this is based on? And so I bought number one and I thought, this will do me for a while, and I read it in like an hour, and then I thought, I need to get another one of these. I remember the summer of 2010 very clearly, and Scott Pilgrim was a large part of just the general vibe of that experience. It was my first summer back from university. I'd gone a few years later than everybody else, so I was in my early 20s at the time about Scott Pilgrim age. I was listening to iFight Dragons and Anamanaguchi. Later Anamanaguchi would be very heavily involved in Scott Pilgrim media, but at the time it was just a cool chiptuni band that I was enjoying. And so I was listening to Helix Nebula, and I was reading these comics, sat out in the sunny sunshine of my parents' back garden, and I was, I guess, feeling quite Scott Pilgrim-y in general. What am I going to do with my life? Where am I going to go? And these comics connected with me, and this message of, you might be a bit confused about where your life is going now, but you will figure things out, really resonated with me. I won't say that every element of my life was a one-to-one with Scott's at the time. I wasn't, for example, dating a teenager despite being in my 20s, but certainly the general feel of Scott Pilgrim connected with me. I could, I could see what Brian Leomali was doing with these comics. Early 20s kid who's still learning about the world, and who's processing a lot of the world through pop culture references and through video games, and just kind of beginning to understand things and beginning to grow in maturity. The other thing that really spoke to me with these comics as an aspiring comic artist myself was seeing the glorious artwork and what Brian Leomali achieved, and indeed how he grew and developed as an artist over time. Because looking at the first volume in particular I could see that, and I could think to myself, I could give that a go, I could do something like this, and then seeing how he grew and developed this art style. It was an art style which as someone who had only ever read newspaper, comic strips, and Marvel felt so different, and I'd realised for the first time what comics really could be. They could be something more than just Spider-Man. They could have a deeper meaning. Going beyond the art style there was a substance here. There was a meat to this storytelling that I hadn't really felt before, and this was the gateway, the initial start of me discovering so many different comics that actually tell meaningful, heart-filled stories as opposed to punch-punch-bow-pam comics aren't for kids anymore. That's not to denigrate Spider-Man. There's absolutely Spider-Man comics that I really connect with, and I feel very strongly about as well. But what I just mean is this was another level or something, a different direction, a feeling from a comic that I had not had before, and a realisation that this could be comics, and that you didn't need to have necessarily quite as heavy an emphasis on the fighting. Though obviously there is quite a heavy emphasis on fighting in some of these comics. It might be for this reason that I'm so willing to overlook a lot of the elements of Scott Pilgrim that haven't aged particularly well. Certainly I'm willing to take this not necessarily as a perfect piece of art, but as one which attempts to tell a bigger story than it normally gets characterised as. If that's the way that I relate to this comic, and the inspiration and the message that I take away from it, I get the sense that the people who made Scott Pilgrim Takes Off are on a very similar wavelength. I think the genius of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is the fact that this was built primarily as just a straight adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Comics. In the time since Scott Pilgrim Takes Off has released a lot of people have expressed some disappointment that the anime isn't more faithful to the source material, and I absolutely get that. And yes it would have been lovely to see this story told in a very similar form to in the comics. But at the same time the comics do still exist, and I can use my imagination to fill in the blanks a little bit. But also what they did with this anime is something so brilliant, so revolutionary that it's just fantastic. I can't say enough how much I enjoyed it. I've already given a spoiler warning, but one more time here come spoilers for the anime. Scott Pilgrim dies in episode one. How brilliant is it that a media has pulled off this bait and switch? It's one of those things that I think a lot of people have often talked about, oh wouldn't it be interesting if the hero just died off in the first 30 minutes and then somebody else takes up the mantle instead. Oftentimes with these kinds of stories you get lulled into a false sense of security that ah it's the main character nothing bad's ever going to happen to them. And then right out of the gate Scott Pilgrim dies and they hold a funeral for him and Ramona picks up the baton and runs with it and now this is Ramona's show. If I was previously disappointed that Ramona of the film was not as nuanced as Ramona of the comics then Ramona of the anime absolutely makes up for that. So again if you're watching this without having actually seen the anime in the very first episode Scott is defeated by Matthew Patel Ramona's first evil ex-boyfriend. The rest of the show is a who did it rather than a who done it in which Ramona has to figure out which of her evil exes are responsible for Scott's disappearance because as it turns out he isn't as dead as everybody thinks. Somebody has kidnapped Scott and somebody has made it look very much like he died. Who has done that and why? In order to solve this mystery Ramona has to do what she would not have done in the comics which is have a genuine heartfelt conversation with all of her evil exes to figure out why they're unhappy with her what she could have done better in their relationships and whether or not they were involved in the disappearance of her new boyfriend. Right out of the gate one thing that this does very well is make it clear that Ramona actually genuinely likes Scott which is something that as I say was entirely missing from the film. Like she's called out uh several times I think by characters who say why are you putting so much effort into this one guy you went on one date with was it really that good of a date to which she says yes and there was a spark there was a connection there that she hadn't felt before and she wants to pursue it further. This makes it very clear Scott and Ramona are meant to be together they just work as a couple and even in an alternate timeline where things are all messed around Ramona is making that relationship happen. I think my personal favorite episode of this is the episode in which she confronts Roxy Richter her evil ex-girlfriend and where Roxy talks with Ramona blatantly and candidly about how Ramona just kind of up and left one day. Like Roxy thought that they had something stronger than they genuinely did Ramona kind of strung her along for a while and then just pieced out of her life the moment it was inconvenient. All of this happens because it's a Scott Pilgrim story with the two characters fighting their way through various film scenes because they're having a giant battle in the middle of a VHS rental shop. At the end of it Ramona genuinely apologizes and Roxy accepts because ultimately that was all she needed that a lot of Ramona's evil exes wouldn't really be all that evil if a viewed from a different perspective or b if Ramona had just given them the closure that they needed and from that point onwards Rift healed these two are now friends again and Roxy is willing to even flirt with Kim a little bit and just see where else she can go. It's a very clever subverting of the story suddenly instead of it being about defeating evil exes Ramona has to come to terms with and fix her relationship with these people that she has wronged over the course of her life. The story makes it very clear that an enemy is only an enemy until the moment that you're able to patch things up and then suddenly they are one of your friends and they are one of your most adorable friends and it's wonderful seeing all of these evil exes playing together and genuinely being nice to each other like there's niceness here that we haven't seen in the Scott Pilgrim world before. The Roxy Richter episode ends with a song which I've absolutely fallen in love with by Tegan and Sarah which contains the line I wouldn't like me if I met me and boy does that not give me chills because that's kind of the point of Ramona's story here she's suddenly realising that she has had a negative impact on these people and to tell you what I can absolutely relate to not necessarily liking oneself. That's the point of Scott Pilgrim, right? That we see our own flaws and we see our own failings and we work to improve them and that's what Ramona does and that's how she's able to save the day even in a Scott Pilgrim story that doesn't have a lot of Scott Pilgrim. It helps of course that the animation is absolutely beautiful although sometimes it's more successful than in other times. There are certain scenes where I feel like they've kind of overstretched their capability and their budget and have tried a little bit too hard and been a little bit too ambitious. I've got nothing against that to be honest because a big swing and a miss is always better than playing it safe and for the most part the show looks absolutely gorgeous just a joy to behold. It looks like an anime version of the comics which is exactly what it is because the production team behind this are all genuine anime veterans. If there's a flaw in the show's presentation and yes I am absolutely stalling before addressing the elephant in the room that is the last few episodes, if there's a flaw in the show it is in the voice acting unfortunately. In every other aspect I'm willing to praise this show endlessly but I've got to say that some of the voice actors in the show do not quite work for me. When I first heard that the cast for the films Scott Pilgrim vs the world would be reprising their roles in animated form I wasn't quite sure I was on board with that because I kind of would have liked a fresh clean take. As it turns out I was absolutely right to think that because at least to me the voices come across as being that horrible thing where Hollywood A-listers get cast in films that they're not supposed to be in and it just doesn't sound right like you're Chris Pratt as Mario or Garfield or like for example you're Chris Evans as Buzz Lightyear like it just doesn't quite work and you'd think to yourself it would have been better to get a professional voice actor. In particular I think there's an issue where the characters voices don't necessarily match the anime art style and the energy that that brings where they developed this character in a physical form where they had a physical presence and now it's all about the voice and the voice just doesn't match up to that anime vibe. I'm not going to name specific names of actors that I don't think do a great job in this but I will point out some that I think absolutely nail it because this is not true across the board. Jason Swartzman absolutely knocks it out of the park he's brilliant as Gideon Graves in animated form and that's not a huge surprise given that I already saw him this year as the spot in Into the Spider-Verse no across the Spider-Verse beyond the Spider-Verse he was in a Spider-Verse film as the spot and he was brilliant in that and he's brilliant in this. He works absolutely. Another one who's absolutely spectacularly brilliant is Sacha Baba as Matthew Patel and maybe yes he is my favourite Evil X anyway but seriously this actor is brilliant he completely understands the assignment he is an anime villain to AT he's got exactly the right energy for the animation why do we not see more of this guy oh yeah Hollywood's racist like every other actor in the original film has gone on to mega stardom every other actor is a big big big deal and this one guy is not I'm sorry I'm getting distracted I'm getting distracted I'm just saying he's really really good and he deserves more. One actor that did a really good job despite not sounding anything like I imagine the character in my head Johnny Simmons as young Neil I've always seen young Neil as being a little bit more self-aware and a little bit less dopey than he appears in both live action film and in the cartoon there are some tremendously heartbreaking scenes in the comics as he's getting increasingly frustrated because this friendship group is crumbling around him and everybody's just kind of abandoned him and that side of the character is not seen in any of these moving picture adaptations of the story but he's just so funny as this kind of slightly dopey character who's a little bit slower than everybody else and is just barely struggling to keep up like it's very very entertaining whether or not this is the version of young Neil that I imagined in my head. Okay all of that said I think it's time for me to address the elephant in the room the big plot twist at the end of the series the fact that the only Evil X that Scott Pilgrim has to defeat in Scott Pilgrim takes off is Ramona's eighth Evil X, Scott Pilgrim. There's a reason why I've not wanted to talk about this sooner and I want to be very careful in the way that I do so because some genuine lives are involved in this. You may have noticed the foreshadowing from earlier in the episode but we're going to be talking about real people again. I did kind of guess that this was where the show was going because for one thing if there's a who done it and somebody grabbed Scott out of a portal it would be most interesting if it were Scott himself and if you open this up to time travel why not that's just kind of a fun idea and I'm very glad that it is a time travel story and not what I was worried about was a multiverse story because I've had enough of multiverses but yeah Scott Pilgrim kidnapped himself he staged it to look like Matthew Patel defeated him it's part of a grander scheme in order to try and undo his 13 years of marriage to Ramona. We go to the future we see the future the future doesn't look great but Wallace Wells is doing alright for himself because he's married up. Oh I didn't mention Wallace. I don't like the way that Wallace is presented in this show because he's a little bit more mean to Scott I feel like Kieran Culkin has brought with him some of his character traits from Succession but at the same time I also really don't like the idea of him and Todd Ingram it's just I feel like Wallace would have better taste but that's beside the point. It is in the future segment of this episode that we get the joke that made me laugh so hard I had to pause the episode on the train that I was sat on and just giggle to myself for a while. It's built up that Wallace Wells' husband is somehow phenomenally rich and wealthy some kind of superstar and we don't know who it's going to be but maybe I'm thinking to myself oh no is it Todd? Did he marry Todd? And it's built up that Wallace's husband works at Nintendo and I could not stop laughing because it is classic kind of Scott Pilgrim humour this idea of just bringing that back and there's not a lot of video game references in Scott Pilgrim takes off I imagine they were probably harder to clear for this than they would have been for the film and I imagine that they're also harder to just kind of slip in than they were in the comic where no one really cares about what's in a comic Nintendo's not watching that like a hawk. Okay so let's talk about real life again. Brian Lea-Malley has spoken about how difficult it was going to be to return to Scott Pilgrim and he has said that he would always like to he is considered doing another volume of the comic but it's difficult to figure out where the characters are going to be so many years down the line and I think especially with that ambiguous ending to the comic which is then picked up by the film this idea of Scott and Ramona having a certain amount of time left but not really knowing whether they're going to work out or not but just giving it a go and seeing what happens the logical kind of follow through for that is that they don't have a fairy tale happily ever after. The other wrinkle to the story is because this is based on Brian Lea-Malley's actual relationship with Hope Larson the acclaimed comic artist we know exactly where things ended up for them and again I don't like dwelling on an actual couple's actual history but imagine for a second that your relationship with your husband is blown up into this over-the-top dramatic really like high big budget enormous film this blockbuster like your romance is a blockbuster film and then imagine how it must feel to be constantly bombarded with that when the relationship doesn't last. Hope Larson and Brian Lea-Malley got married in 2004 while the Scott Pilgrim series was still ongoing and they divorced in 2014 after 10 years that's a good run for any marriage and I don't really want to comment on anything else to do with their relationship but this idea that the couple that inspired Scott and Ramona ultimately divorced is not something that can be skipped over or glossed over in coming back to these characters. Now obviously there is a difference between fiction and between real life and absolutely characters that are fictitious can go on and have their own lives it's not necessarily the case that Scott and Ramona had to be entirely tied to Brian Lea-Malley and Hope Larson's marriage forever like that's just silly these characters are their own thing and they're not a direct one-to-one translation of these real people at the same time I can imagine why it was not easy necessarily for Brian Lea-Malley to come back to this particular relationship and try and explore where it would be 13-14 years down the line like that must not be an easy thing to write and to his credit in revisiting Scott and Ramona he definitely casts the character that is his self-insert fan fiction character Scott Pilgrim he casts him as the villain of the piece which I think takes a certain amount of self-awareness and also absolutely fits with the plot of Scott Pilgrim it's a perfect metaphor for a series which has always dealt with the idea of maturing and growing and learning from your mistakes and being willing to examine yourself rather than just stick your fingers in the ears and blindly ignore all of your own frailties when confronted with the difficult situation Scott has fallen entirely into old habits and has attempted to erase his past rather than appreciate the lessons that he can take from it and move on and try and better himself he is stuck endlessly trying to erase what came before because he does not like having to deal with his own past and with the mistakes that he has made it's also entirely appropriate for a pair of characters who we knew were always going to have a difficult time of things they went into their relationship again knowing that things were going to be difficult and they might not last forever what's all the more heartbreaking and indeed very clever is this idea that future Scott is then so obsessed with trying to erase his past so that he can get rid of his heartbreak that he misses out on opportunities to fix his future and he loses 10 years of his life and 10 years of his relationship with Ramona because he's unwilling to just meet her halfway and try and communicate with her when he could rather just try and erase everything and just start afresh and have a different life entirely he's so trapped in the past that he can't fix what's coming and then there's that absolutely heartbreaking scene in which a middle aged Scott turns to Ramona and realizes suddenly that if he hadn't shut himself off in the wilderness for 10 years he could have potentially patched things up with her and he asks well can we get back together now and she says just like that after 10 years no dude no you made the wrong choice finding a satisfying next step for Scott and Ramona's life was never going to be easy and this particularly heartbreaking direction and taking the characters genuinely does feel appropriate for them but is also presented in such a way that we can kind of laugh off a lot of the the heartbreak and the anguish that they have caused each other it's not easy to make a story that is at once very entertaining but also really sad ultimately Scott was always destined to become Ramona's eighth ex as said there's a lot more going on here than people give Brian the O'Malley credit for this one signed by the way to Matthew you see that to Matthew uh what year did this one come out 2014 2014 Brian the O'Malley was promoting his new book seconds which is downstairs currently and he went around on a little signing tour of the UK and I queued for an hour and I got to meet him he is huge in real life I mean I'm not a particularly large person he was like he towered over me it was brilliant meeting him in real life absolutely brilliant and I got him to sign the book and I'm very happy with that I suppose the nice thing about the Scott Pilgrim takes off anime is that it gives us an opportunity to re-explore some of these characters in a fresh light after 10 years of experience and we get to see for ourselves just how much they've changed and grown and we get to see for ourselves just how much we have changed and grown as an audience those of us that remember the release of the original film and the original comics certainly in revisiting these things after so many years there are elements of Scott Pilgrim that are problematic and it's interesting how the anime kind of plays down a few things for example Scott's relationship with knives just to make it a little bit less awkward and the fact indeed that the entire story spins away from this idea of fighting evil exes to win Ramona's heart and instead leans more heavily into this idea of genuine connection between people as being the catalyst for solving the vast majority of grievances and upset and the creation of evil exes ultimately for all of the time travel shenanigans the end of the anime is quite similar to the end of the books and the film Scott and Ramona have had some rocky issues but they're going to give it a go and they're going to explore their relationship and see where it takes them and see how much joy and wonder they can get from each other along the way they might not last forever they're probably not going to last forever but they're going to have fun while they can there is also the hope the hope that either a young or an old version of Scott will put aside his flaws will work to improve himself and will fix the things within himself that are keeping him from Ramona because now it is made entirely clear that the evil exes were in no way ever an actual impediment to these two dating the only genuine impediment was the fact that Scott himself is a flawed person that Ramona herself is a flawed person and if they are able to overcome those flaws maybe they'll have a go of it after all in all of this i'm not saying that Scott Pilgrim is a perfect story in any form there are problems in both the comic and in the film and in the new anime and in the video game things that are a bit icky are a little bit just morally awkward which are just a part of the story but the fact is that it's a story about recognizing your flaws and overcoming those flaws and so I don't think there's a problem necessarily with seeing Scott Pilgrim for what it is a fundamentally flawed piece of work which is also kind of brilliant and enjoying it for the good stuff while also aiming to improve so that some new iteration of this in the future or some story that takes inspiration from Scott Pilgrim is able to overcome and remove those flaws and be better as a result because ultimately that is the point of this story you can like a thing and also know that it's not perfect i think if there's a moral to this story it is that there is a benefit to looking at ourselves recognizing our flaws and finding ways to improve that is true of Scott Pilgrim the character and it is true of Brian Leo Malley when analyzing his own body of work and if there's anything we can agree on it's that Anna Maniguchi are brilliant thank you very much by the way for watching all of this i know this is not our usual kind of video and i know this is the third of these me on camera videos that i've done thus far and i don't necessarily know how they're going over like if people are actually enjoying this format or not for me it's significantly quicker and easier for making a video and that is my priority because life is so ridiculously busy at the moment and it is hard to get videos done unless i just find the quickest way of doing it which is just to put myself in front of a camera and just start talking and see what comes out and this in particular is a subject that i think i've come across honestly here this is something that is very close to my heart absolutely love Scott Pilgrim and having seen the anime i just really needed to get this out of my system and just fire it off into the ether so this is me doing that and clearing house and perhaps with our next video we'll go back to something that's a little bit more topical and a little bit more kind of relevant to the interest of the vast majority of our audience but either way thank you so much for watching this all the way to the end it is genuinely appreciated and yeah we love you guys we're really really grateful for you watching thanks