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 (a movie) Scott's 1982 science fiction film, "Blade Runner". The plot of that film was based on Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and not the Nourse and Burroughs source material, although the film does incorporate the term "blade runner," though with a different meaning than in the novel. Blade Runner (a movie) Blade Runner (a movie) is a science fiction novella by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, first published in 1979. The novella began as a story treatment for a proposed film adaptation of Alan E. Nourse's novel "The Bladerunner". A later edition published in the 1980s