Happy Holidays December 24, 2007 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Happy Holidays everyone. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.

At this time of year I enjoy listening to the Bach Festival on WKCR FM 89.9 in New York. The festival just started this morning. If you’re not in the NY area, you can listen online.

A few days ago I received my Blade Runner box set. Among the many items was a forty minute deleted/alternate scene reel, which was edited into a complete mini-film. To an obsessive fan like me, watching this footage was a surreal gift. It was Blade Runner in an alternate dimension. I saw the original intention of the screenwriters: a film noir in the style of Chinatown, forty years in the future, with beat-poet-like voice-overs and a loser protagonist. There are dozens of voice-overs that I had never heard. And there are some scenes were Harrison Ford (aka Rick Deckard) acts like such a buffoon that you know why they cut the scene and perhaps why he seldom speaks of the film.

“Really, I can go in the back where the girls are?” Rick asks.
“Sure,” the bartender says. “You’re a cop. You’ve got a badge.”
“Thanks buddy!” Rick says.

— Yes, the man who hunts and kills humans for a living needs to be told by a bartender that he doesn’t have to follow the rules. I found that amusing. What was especially cool was the alternate views and extended scenes, particularly of Leon’s apartment, outside Sebastian’s home, and also the expanded character development of Gaff. In the interviews on the DVD, Edwards James Olmos (Gaff) at one point says “Cylon” instead of “Replicant,” and that really cracked me up. Ronald Moore says that he watched Blade Runner when conceiving of the Cylons for his re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Hope all of you have a happy holiday.