There once was a show I won't watch

I know people love Breaking Bad

But it seems unmercifully sad

Was rooting for Fox

Or Chandler, who rocks

For either of those I'd be glad.

There once was an opening salvo

So this year I'm pulling for Lost

In hopes that Mad Men will get tossed

But Mad Men won writing

Uphill Lost is fighting

It's chances might begin to frost :(

There once was a stale category

Since the first reality Emmy

It has played out predictably

The Amazing Race

Always took first place

But Top Chef broke the streak – whoopee!

There once was a big bang upset

With people like Carell and Baldwin

As really big time competition

The Big Bang guy won

People said "come on!"

His PR team was on a mission.

There once was a Family and Glee

Modern Family went two for two

It started to look like a coup

But then Jane Lynch won

And her speech was fun

Before off the stage she was shooed.

There once was an Emmy host named Jimmy

Jimmy opened the show with a bang

By performing with the Glee gang

Then grabbed a guitar

And while breathing hard

Wished to himself he hadn't sang.

There once was a Pilgrim named Scott

Unless you played video games

You might think this is pretty strange

It's anime meets

The Rage of the Streets

And within Michael Cera's range.

They've made movies that are slavishly devoted to their graphic novel source material before – sometimes you score a 300 and sometimes you get stuck in Sin City. Fortunately, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is way more of the former, as it's full-tilt fun from the first minute on.

The movie sums up a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, hitting the high points of the six-book cycle. It's the oldest story in the world: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy has to fight girl's seven evil exes, evil exes explode into coins when boy punches them, and so on. That's right – in addition to other visual flourishes like captions appearing on screen and cartoon hearts appearing over characters kissing, Scott Pilgrim comes off like a slacker version of Super Mario Bros.

Michael Cera delivers another patented performance as the sorta-nerdy-sorta-cool-vaguely-effeminate-emo-type-guy, but in this case it's pretty much perfect casting. The rest of the cast scores, too, particularly a couple cameos by Chris Evans and Brandon Routh. And director Edgar Wright steps outside of his previous parodies to deliver a film with similar visual sizzle but a different kind of emotional connection. At heart, Scott Pilgrim is a fairly standard twentysomething story, but the inventive style, videogame trappings and underlying sweetness elevate it to another level.