Scott Pilgrim's precious little logo

(Photo source: "The 30 Best IRL Ramona Flowers")

Like the "Sundance Curse" on indie films that take the festival by storm and then tank outside Park City, there seems to be a Comic-Con curse on films that garner enormous buzz within the halls of the San Diego Convention Center and then somehow fail to interest non-geeks when they hit theaters. Unfortunately, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the latest blockbuster to join that list of films that flopped after the SDCC hype (they've included Grindhouse and The Spirit).

It's unfortunate because Scott Pilgrim, a perfect marriage of source material and director, is in no way a two-hour piece of fecal matter like most of those other flops, due to Wright's respect for--and enhancement of--Bryan Lee O'Malley's material and inventive gags like what has to be the most amusing cover of the Universal logo music to ever open a Universal picture.

O'Malley's creation is partly influenced by 8-bit video games, so legendary Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich redid Jerry Goldsmith's Universal fanfare in 8-bit form. It accompanies an NES-style version of the Universal globe that's as charmingly pixelly as all those title screen graphics that would open NES games I used to play as a kid. The enthusiastic audience that was treated to an advance Scott Pilgrim screening at Comic-Con went so wild over this opening gag that a Wired blogger couldn't even hear the drowned-out 8-bit logo music and wondered in his post if the opening piece was the Legend of Zelda theme. The redone fanfare also opens Godrich's digital-only Scott Pilgrim score album.



Another studio logo music parody I like is the J.B.'s-style cover of the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start of White Men Can't Jump (one of many instances where a Fox release spoofed the fanfare--another example was Alien³). Alfred Newman never sounded so funky.