"Knives Out Against Murdoch"? Is he going to taste her steel?

I must be the only one who saw that headline and thought, "What did Rupert Murdoch do to piss off Knives Chau from Scott Pilgrim?"

And also: "Where can I see this fight because the sight of that old douche getting his ass handed to him in a fight would make my week?"

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.

TV arty

Screw the overcrowded and stress-inducing San Diego Comic-Con (which begins today). Here at A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog is an Artists' Alley that's far less crowded or funny-smelling than the one down there. It consists of the niftiest TV show-inspired artwork I've found on the Web.


Treme by illustrator and Fistful of Soundtracks listener Owen Freeman (for a WaPo article about the show).


Phil Dunphy from Modern Family, Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation and Michael Scott from The Office by Freeman (for a WaPo critique of mockumentary sitcoms).


Dr. Girlfriend from The Venture Bros. by Darwyn Cooke. [Via Almost Darwyn Cooke's Blog]


Futurama/X-Men mash-up by gottabecarl.


The Simpsons by Lelpel.


Spaced/Scott Pilgrim vs. the World mash-up (made through the Scott Pilgrim movie site's avatar creator) by Dark Bunny Tees.


"Sushi Off a Friend," an A-Team/Greatest American Hero mash-up by Scott Campbell.


Leverage by Kweli.


The 11th Doctor and Amy Pond from Doctor Who by Blair D. Shedd, one of the illustrators of IDW's Doctor Who comics.


Twilight Zone by Ken Garduno.


Twilight Zone's "To Serve Man" ep by Garduno.


The Colbert Report by Sean Pryor, with Colbert surrounded by Douglas Rushkoff (far left), Jon Stewart and the recently deceased Harvey Pekar (from Pekar's SMITH Magazine comic "Kibbitzin' About How Life Got Incorporated").

Metric is streaming a sneak preview of their Scott Pilgrim music

Universal's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comics by one of my favorite newer filmmakers, Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright, doesn't come out until August. But you can get a sneak peek of the star-studded soundtrack, thanks to the Toronto band Metric, which posted on Facebook this weekend one of several original songs they contributed to Pilgrim.


Metric provided the sounds for The Clash at Demonhead, one of the title bassist hero's fictional musical rivals, while Beck will represent Scott's own band Sex Bob-omb, and Broken Social Scene will represent another fictional band, Crash and the Boys.

Like everything else I've heard from Metric, "Black Sheep" sounds terrific. Hit the "Become a Fan" button on their Facebook page to hear "Black Sheep."

[Via Wright and Robot 6]