I'd call myself a Scott Pilgrim fan. A fan of Scott Pilgrim, if you will.

Not Scott Pilgrim the character tho. He's kind of a creep.

Which, of course, is what makes Scott Pilgrim Takes Off such a masterpiece.

Advertise it as if it were a straightforward, 100% faithful animated adaptation of the comic.

Go through almost the entirety of Episode 1 being a straightforward adaptation of the comic.

Kill Scott Pilgrim.

Whait, wat?

OK, do I have your attention now? Suddenly, instead of being a Netflix™ sponsored re-hash that nobody really needed, it's something unexpected that people are talking about. Maybe people will tell you "Just go in blind, that's the best way." Wow, way to pique my curiosity. Or maybe they'll frame it like I did: Kicking off the series by summarily killing off the titular character, whomst the internet has informed me is Bad™, actually? Is in fact, practically synonymous with that great villain of my generation, the Nice Guy™?


Not that Ramona herself escapes vilification, as perhaps the archetypal "Manic Pixie Dream Girl."

Don't worry, unremarkable male! This totally hot chick with dyed hair is gonna fall in love with you and fix everything! Also, she's basically a magic girlfriend, but I digress.

Well... they say hindsight is 20/20. All artists cringe at their old art, etc. Most people aren't lucky enough to get a re-do, but apparently Bryan Lee O'Malley was.

This is basically what George Lucas utterly failed to do, btw. The man felt shackled to what had become the definitive work of his career. And he resented it. So what do we get? The Special Edition. The Prequel Trilogy. The shambling corpse that is the sequel trilogy. Finally, Star Wars distilled down to its purest essence: corporate sludge.

Kind of an ignoble end.

And then we have Scott Pilgrim. The story about the basic white boy slacker who gets the totally hot girl and also he's the strongest fighter in Toronto and he's good at Super Mario Bros. 3 or something!

Didn't he date an underage high school student at one point?

Oooohhhhh, problematic. Time to cancel Scott Pilgrim.

Well, Scott Pilgrim is dead, long live Scott Pilgrim!

If you've been paying attention, it's clear that O'Malley has always had feelings about the ending of Scott Pilgrim. After all, the comics weren't even finished by the time the live-action movie came out. A live action movie that itself had multiple alternate endings considered, ranging from "Scott and the (no longer) underage High School student end up together" to "Scott Pilgrim is a serial killer who is imagining that he's some kind of video game hero while murdering all of his stalker crush's exes."

And then you have the Scott Pilgrim video game (famously unavailable for purchase for a period of five years due to licensing issues). You actually get a different ending depending on which character you play as: Scott Pilgrim, Steven Stills, Kim Pine, Ramona Flowers, Knives Chau, NegaScott, or Wallace Wells. Most of the endings are... like basically not good? Like if you win as Scott, then he never actually grows as a character and stays a loser but for some reason all the girls want him?

But the obviously best ending is when you play through as Ramona. Like, girl, they're YOUR exes, YOU fight them.

So honestly... the ending of Scott Pilgrim is pretty much multiple choice. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is in a similar vein, but diverges much earlier than most other timelines.

Well, hang on.

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, the final volume of the comic, was published in July 2010.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the film adaptation, released in August 2010, just a month later. We can assume the writing was finished much earlier, meaning the ending of the film was written before the ending of the comics. And... the video game came out the same month.

So basically, there is no canon ending. They all just kinda... happened around the same time.

Anyway, watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. It's probably the best version yet, and it's stylish as hell, to boot. Get kind of a Studio Trigger vibe...