Film· 1982· Science Fiction

Blade Runner

by Ridley Scott

Blade Runner: 1 recorded work traces back to it, and it draws on 3 recorded sources.

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What Blade Runner influenced

Works that record this one as a source, with the evidence a contributor gave.

カウボーイビバップ Cowboy Bebop

Animated Series · 1998

InfluenceMEDIUM

Shinichiro Watanabe has named it among the show's sources, and it is the look that came across: a lived-in future of rain, neon and street food where the technology is old and repaired rather than gleaming, and the city is crowded with people who are not the story. Bebop puts a jazz score over it where Scott used Vangelis, which changes the mood without changing the world.

What influenced Blade Runner

The works this one is recorded as drawing on.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Film · 1968

InfluenceMEDIUM

Scott has described 2001 as the film that raised the bar and, by his own account, made him want to work at that level of density. The debt is in the craft rather than the story: miniatures shot with long lenses and heavy atmosphere so the scale reads, interfaces that are diegetic and unexplained, and a pace that lets an audience look around a room. The graph already holds 2001 pointing at Alien on the same grounds; the Los Angeles of 2019 is the other end of the same design argument.

Frankenstein

Book · 1818

InfluenceMEDIUM

The film's climax is Shelley's scene: the made thing confronts the man who made it and asks him for more life, and is refused. Roy Batty finding Tyrell is the creature finding Victor on the ice, with the same demand and the same answer, and both stories give the creature the better argument. Scott and Hampton Fancher have discussed the Promethean frame; the graph already holds Frankenstein pointing at the novel this film adapts, which makes the line worth drawing separately.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Book · 1968

AdaptationMEDIUM

Loose adaptation but it retains the core elements of Dick's novel:

  • Rick Deckard as the protagonist.
  • Androids (renamed "replicants") hunted by bounty hunters ("blade runners").
  • Roy Batty (Roy Baty in the novel) as the principal antagonist.
  • Questions about humanity, identity, and artificial life.

About the work

Blade Runner

Former blade runner Rick Deckard is reluctantly forced back into service for one last assignment: eliminate four escaped Replicants from the colonies who have returned to Earth to find their creator.