A podcast about things you people wouldn’t believe
Back on September 7 of last year, I sent Rene Ritchie and Guy English an email titled “Some ’80s films for your consideration.” This was shortly after our popular “Dune” podcast (and before the always insightful Matt Drance would join us to discuss “RoboCop”). At the time we were trying to come up with another geek movie to blather on about for 90 minutes.
The email was a list of 40 films that I thought were significant and timeless. On that list was “Blade Runner.” This is what I had to say about it in the email:
This is the biggest impact science fiction film of the ’80s, as far as I’m concerned. Everything changed after this one. In fact, the creators of RoboCop were inspired by it. But maybe it’s already been over-analyzed to death.
I wasn’t being hyperbolic. Every dystopian-cyberpunk-noir thriller that would follow has “Blade Runner” in its DNA. And there were a lot of them. Some might not exist at all if it weren’t for the singular and prescient vision of Ridley Scott and his collaborators.
Look at “Ghost in the Shell,” “Dark City” and “The Matrix.” Would those be the same without “Blade Runner?” I doubt it. Even Ronald Moore has said that the Cylons in his re-imagined “Battlestar Galactica” owe much to the replicants of “Blade Runner.”
That fear of everything already having been said about “Blade Runner”—at least everything of consequence—is why I had it so far down the list.
So I asked Rene to put off doing “the big one” for awhile. Maybe I thought we needed to first earn the right to discuss it. Who knows. For me, it was intimidating.
Eventually I realized that doing the podcast is not necessarily about saying something new. It’s about saying something true. That took the pressure off. Because I truly love this movie. I hope that comes through.
You can listen to our celebration of “Blade Runner” here.