culture Scott Pilgrim vs. Reality

A fan's camera captures Scott Pilgrim's stomping grounds.

Shortly after the Scott Pilgrim movie was released, in August 2010, Steven Dirckze, a Sheridan College student, set out with a few friends on a “Scott Pilgrimmage.” The idea was to visit all the locations used by Bryan Lee O’Malley in the original graphic novels. By carrying around the books for reference and by positioning his camera just so, Dirckze was able to capture photos that more or less replicate the angles in the illustrations. In a stroke of fanboy brilliance, he then edited the photos together with the original comic panels and posted the resulting images online.



“I suppose most of it was simply the amazement that a fictional and involving story had taken place so close,” Dirckze wrote, in an email, of his motivation for embarking upon the project. “It’s like going to a Disney Park, or the Harry Potter section of Universal Studios in Orlando, in that it breaks the boundary between reality and fantasy.” He’s particularly proud of having discovered what he believes to have been the basis for Scott and Ramona’s date spot—a park in the Casa Loma area. Pilgrim scholars had thought it was fictional.

The photos, some of which you can see in the gallery below (the rest are in Dirckze’s Imgur album), were taken over the course of a single day in 2010, at the end of which Dirckze and his friends went—where else?—to the Scotiabank Theatre, to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Not for the first time.