An excellent film and its connection to an old TV series...

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 1999)

Blade Runner -- just as it played originally in theaters -- is probably my favorite movie of all time.
It has all the elements that make a film something really different and special. The film has depth, creativity and a great deal of meaning to it. It also has intense action; exotic sets and costumes; colorful characters, and a strange, evocative emotional texture... that's hard to put into words.
The reason I like the original cut, with Harrison Ford's narration, goes back to fond memories of a TV series called Dragnet. In that series, Jack Webb, the actor who starred as the long-suffering hero "Sergeant Joe Friday," also narrated the show's action. There was something very appealing and reassuring about his voice, and Ford, playing a rather different -- yet not so different -- policeman of the future in Blade Runner, brought back the memory of another good-guy cop from another time and place.
Based (albeit somewhat loosely) on Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner also owes some of its wonderful creativity to William S. Burroughs who, if I remember correctly, had some input into the writing of the screenplay.
A film worth every second put into watching it.