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Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Thoss2014 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Scott Pilgrim", Adaptation, Canada, Film adaptation, Game, Intermediality, O’Malley. Bryan Lee Creators: Ryan, Thon, Thoss Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska Press (Lincoln) Collection: Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology |
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Abstract |
“Jeff Thoss’s “Tell It Like a Game: Scott Pilgrim and Performative Media Rivalry” also deals with the intermedial relationships between film and comics, but rather than examining these relations from a broad historical perspective, […] he focuses on a particular case—namely, Edgar Wright’s 2010 film adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic book series Scott Pilgrim (2004–10). According to Thoss, the comic book and the film version attempt to outdo each other in their imitation of a third medium—in this case, computer games. The comic book series already makes its readers well aware of the ubiquity of the intermedial references through its plot, which revolves around twenty-something Scott Pilgrim’s attempt to win over Ramona Flowers in Toronto. While this brief description may sound similar to any other tired boy-meets-girl story, it turns out that in order to “win” Ramona, Scott must defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends in a number of ever more spectacular fights, evidently inspired by the beat-’em-up genre of video games. Moreover, the film and the comic books present a number of features, such as representational techniques, extra lives, or save points, that clearly originate in the worlds of computer games. Though these intermedial references are all already present in the comic book series, Thoss goes on to show that the film attempts to outdo the comic book series in its emulation of video game features both on the level of the storyworld and on the level of its representation. But as neither of these two works emerges victorious, their so-called rivalry appears less as a real competition than as a way to illuminate the specific narrative affordances and limitations of comics, films, and computer games.” (From the editors’ introduction, p. 13)
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