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
Versions of Blade Runner is not a replicant, and declaring "Blade Runner: Where Love Could Be the Deadliest Sin". In this version, the initial text crawl at the start of the movie explaining what a replicant is "Early in the 21st Century..." is read by an anonymous announcer (not Harrison Ford). The actual text of the opening text crawl is different from the 1982 US theatrical release: "Early in the 21st Century, robots known as Replicants were created as off-world slave labor. Identical to humans [sic], Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who