William Blake in popular culture all cited Blake as one of their major inspirations. Comic designer William Blake Everett claims to be descended from Blake. In his film "Mean Streets" (1973), Martin Scorsese refers to Blake's poem "The Tyger" when a young pet tiger makes Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro take refuge atop a couch, paralleling the grit and innocence of life in the city. A variation on a verse from Blake's "America a Prophecy" appears in Ridley Scott's science fiction film "Blade Runner" (1982), spoken by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). This has been interpreted as a way of linking Batty to Blake's mythic
Blade Runner fit the studio's marketing as an action/adventure movie. Others acclaimed its complexity and predicted it would stand the test of time. Negative criticism in the United States cited its slow pace. Sheila Benson from the "Los Angeles Times" called it "Blade Crawler", and Pat Berman in "The State" and "Columbia Record" described it as "science fiction pornography". Pauline Kael praised "Blade Runner" as worthy of a place in film history for its distinctive sci-fi vision, yet criticized the film's lack of development in "human terms". Academics began writing analyses of the film almost as soon as it was released, and