The Scott Pilgrim anime opening credits are a real banger, of course

There’s a conversation that crops up around Scott Pilgrim — the dude, the comic, and the movie named after him — far too often to go unaddressed: Scott Pilgrim is dating a high schooler.

Scott Pilgrim creator and showrunner of the new Netflix anime Scott Pilgrim Takes Off has responded to fan confusion about the show. The eight-part series begins with a pretty huge twist in its opening episode, before veering into a new direction from both the comics and the Edgar Wright-directed movie.

Were you expecting a 1:1 remake of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off? Not only does the Netflix animated series veer wildly away from the source material, its first episode has a mind-blowing twist that has already broken the internet.

You can practically picture the pitch of the Scott Pilgrim Takes Off anime as an Archive of Our Own summary: What if Scott Pilgrim disappears before his fight with Ramona Flowers’ first Evil Ex? What if Ramona has to go Sherlock Mode for the missing Scott and unearths a grander conspiracy to sabotage her future with Scott?

Music has always been an integral part of Scott Pilgrim. There are the in-universe bands – Sex Bob-omb, The Clash at Demonhead, The Katayanagi Twins – and the (often banger) songs they play, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the Worldadded a lot of moody and groovy music to the mix to help complement the hyper-stylized approach Edgar Wright took to the adaptation.

“Why are we doing this now?” is an understandable question to have when hearing about the new Netflix anime Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, or even throughout most of its first episode. There are identical lines and visual jokes, and with the entire star-studded cast of the movie back in voice roles, it seems like the show is setting up to be a pretty faithful (but admittedly stylish) retread of Edgar Wright’s 2010 cult classic.

With another new weekend comes another fresh batch of streaming recommendations, so you can sit back, kick your feet up, and be safe in the knowledge that there's no shortage of movies and TV shows to watch. 

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off gives the beloved story the anime treatment in a fun, multiverse-bending eight-part series. Reuniting all of the voice cast from Edgar Wright’s 2010 film adaptation, the Netflix show is created by comic book creator Bryan Lee O'Malley, and picks up in a very familiar place with Scott Pilgrim. Indeed, we begin with the bass guitarist for Sex Bob-Omb meeting the woman of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and finding out about her league of evil exes. 

Scott Pilgrim isn’t getting any older. That’s really his problem, when you get right down to it. In 2010, the year the character made his big-screen debut in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, he was a youthful but dissipated 22 years old — a typical product of millennial slacker culture, energized out of his torpor through his quest to win the heart of his dream girl, Ramona Flowers. That quest, and the self-discovery that resulted from it, turned Scott Pilgrim (both the character hailing from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s early-2000s graphic novels and the Edgar Wright-directed adaptation thereof) into a touchstone for a whole generation of semi-sensitive young men who came of age in the early 2000s. For them — for us — Scott was the quintessential Nice Guy: quasi-living proof that the sensitive, needy, guitar-strumming mediocrities among us could inherit, if not the Earth, then at least a girl with really good taste in CDs.

The cyberattack that paralyzed several major Australian ports was a sharp reminder of what governments and experts say is a growing threat to shipping, the lifeblood of the global economy.

This week’s TV premieres are all heavy hitters — some more literally than others (Godzilla is pretty much always at fighting weight, and a total knockout at that). But suffice it to say that while everything else might be looking ahead to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, television is bringing its A game.

A John Wick anime is in the works, says director and franchise helmer Chad Stahelski.