Tannhäuser Gate

The Tannhäuser Gate is a location originally referred to in dialogue in the 1982 film Blade Runner and again in the 1998 film Soldier.

Appearances

Blade Runner

In the 1982 film Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) refers to the gate while recounting his experiences as an off-world commando:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those... moments... will be lost... in time, like... tears... in rain".

The Tannhäuser Gate is never described in any detail during the film, but fans have often assumed that it to be a warp station of some kind, a fact confirmed by one of Soldiers deleted scenes.

Soldier

File:BR-soldier5.jpg

A view of the "Battle of Tannhäuser Gate", from a deleted scene from Soldier

Soldier was written by David Peoples, who co-wrote the script for Blade Runner. In 1998, while promoting Soldier, Peoples revealed that he had written Soldier as being:

"a spin-off sidequel"-spiritual successor to Blade Runner","

seeing both films as existing in the same fictional universe. A Spinner from Blade Runner can be seen in the wreckage on a junk planet in the film. As well as this, one of the battles Kurt Russell's "Todd" character fought in, according to his battle records tattooed onto his arm was "The Battle of Tannhäuser Gate", which Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty had mentioned having also fought in Blade Runner, the implication being that Todd and his fellow soldiers are in fact replicants, continuing the theme introduced in Blade Runner of replicants being provided with false memories. The battle and Tannhäuser Gate itself are shown on-screen in one of the film's deleted scenes.

Hunter Prey

2010 sci-fi film directed by Sandy Collora.

The crew of the Aurora says it that it has just cleared the Tannhäuser Gate before it arrives at the planet.

Origin

The Gate's name comes from a poetic piece written by Rutger Hauer, prior to the filming of his famous monologue in Blade Runner. Segments of this were then used in the scene.

Out-of-universe references

Perhaps in a reference to Blade Runner or through an independent resource, the Japanese animation series Gunbuster created by Gainax makes several references to space travel through a Tannhauser Gate.
The Heavy Gear series of games and fiction make use of the term to describe "a fault in the space-time continuum where two normally distant points of space touch one another".
In the computer game Homeworld, the player must save the Bentusi from Taiidan forces at a place called Tenhauser Gate.
Tannhauser Gate is the name of a Poland-based games design and development studio.[1]
Tannhauser Gate is the title of a song by The Electric Hellfire Club on the album Electronomicon, and the title of a song by Fightstar on the album "One Day Son, This Will All Be Yours".
Tannhauser Gate is the title of a Demoscene demo by the group Cubicle, which features a few Blade Runner inspired 3D scenes
Tannhauser Gate is the name of a book the main character is reading in the last panel of Chapter 10 of the online comic Gunnerkrigg Court [2]
The space trading and combat game Elite Dangerous, some of whose design aesthetics are inspired by the Blade Runner movie, features a starport by the name of Tannhauser Gate
The web comic "The Whiteboard" made a reference to a new Paintball marker manufacturer called Tannhauser Gate in the last panel of the strip posted on July 8th 2015.
"The Shoulder of Orion", a short story in Nature magazine, describes a space-ship travelling through a "Tannhauser Gate," which is described as a "jumpgate".