his latest expansion of the franchise prompted us to wonder: what the hell is a “Blade Runner” exactly? Sure, it makes for a cool-as-hell movie title, but as an in-universe job description, it’s simply baffling. Why not Droid Hunter? Or Robo-cutioner? It’s not like Rick Deckard was a knife-wielding decathlete, so where did the name come from?
It turns out that the answer is surprisingly convoluted. As reported by Vulture in 2017, the term first originated with author Alan E. Nourse in his 1974 science fiction novel The Bladerunner. The book had nothing to do with artificial life or giant neon Atari billboards, but rather a future dystopia in which forced sterilization has created a black market healthcare system reliant on smuggled medical equipment, such as scalpels, supplied by the aptly-named “bladerunners.”
For some reason, the book caught the attention of legendary author and beat poet William S. Burroughs who wanted to adapt it into a movie. Not surprisingly, the film treatment for this creepy sci-fi novel penned by the Naked Lunch guy was “unfilmable,” so Burroughs released his failed pitch as a novella, confusingly titled Blade Runner (a Movie).
Ballantine Books/Blue Wind Press
In the early ‘80s, Ridley Scott was prepping his movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and suggested that screenwriter Hampton Fancher come up with a proper title for the lead character’s job. Fancher got the name by simply scanning his bookshelf — thankfully, he had the Burroughs book, or else Harrison Ford might have starred in Ridley Scott’s Oxford English Dictionary.
'Blade Runner's Bonkers Behind-The-Scenes Reason For Its Title
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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