Snakes on Film

Oh look, Harrison Ford is working with snakes again. Blade runner Rick Deckard tracks down the first of four replicants by using the scale of an artificial snake to find Zhora, who uses a snake in her exotic dance act. The snake manufacture Deckard interrogates has a young Boa Constrictor around his neck; I can’t make out the species of snake in the foreground cage in that scene. Zhora’s snake is a young light-phase Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus); the Wikipedia entry says the snake belonged to the actress (I wouldn’t have figured Joanna Cassidy as a snake keeper). The main problem with this plotline is that snake scales are not like fish scales: they’re ridges of a single piece of skin, not individual scales, and don’t come off like fish scales. How else do you think that snakes shed their skins in a single piece?