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 (franchise) in 1982, during production of "Blade Runner". In 1998, while promoting "Soldier" (then recently released), Peoples then revealed that he had written "Soldier" as a ""spin-off sidequel-spiritual successor"" to "Blade Runner", seeing both films as existing in the same fictional universe. The film obliquely refers to various elements of stories written by Philip K. Dick, and film adaptations thereof. Connections to "Blade Runner" in the film are as follows: The television film "Total Recall 2070" was initially planned as a spin-off of the film "Total Recall", and would eventually be transformed into a hybrid of "Total Recall" and "Blade Runner".