(aka, The Star Diaries)
This is frustrating.
Here we have a brilliant and extremely funny Science Fiction television series, one which ranks right up there with the best science fiction comedy series ever made, like the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf, and yet…
No one knows about it.
Not in the United States, at least.
It’s just massively unfair.
Now those of you who’ve read the work of the Polish Science Fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, will undoubtedly recognize Ijon Tichy’s name. He was the hero of a series of utterly absurd comic adventures and first appeared in a book called The Star Diaries. Tichy wandered across the Galaxy, having one ridiculous adventure after another, telling all his stories in the First Person.
Mind you, there was always a certain question of how much Tichy was telling us was real.
Tichy has long been a favorite in Eastern Europe and Russia, and a number of his stories have been adapted both for animated films and TV movies. But few of them are as good as this all too brief series from 2007.
Part of the fun here is the deliberately retro, trash film aesthetic. Tichy’s rocket is portrayed in the effects sequences by a kitchen gadget — a French Press — only its interior is a tiny, grungy student’s three room apartment — the very same apartment the series star, Oliver Jahn, was living in at the time they were making the series. His ship’s controls are just a collection of random household electronics like a clock radio, microwave and whatever else he had on hand, with an old door latch and keyhole for the starter, and a vacuum cleaner handle for a control stick! A small tank vacuum cleaner stands in for the ship’s pushy maintenance robot, the much-vaunted library is just three or four books on a tiny shelf, and Tichy’s space suit is just a tracksuit jacket and a small, European-style motorcycle helmet without a visor.
And when Tichy needs to work on the ship’s engines, they just went down to the basement of the building, with all its steam pipes and brick walls, and shot there.
Many of the creatures are just as silly and minimal, with my favorites including the mushroom-like monopod aliens with a lampshade for a head, the big, shaggy, muppet-like Kuluups, and the Procytans, like Dr. Spamy, with their tiny proboscis (with working mouth at the end) and anaglyph 3-D glasses.
The other space craft, the alien landscapes and planets all look like models and are equally obviously made from whatever junk they had at hand, even if they’ve been digitally composited.
It’s a very consistent look, and it ties the entire show together in a nicely grungy and outdated sort of way.
Back in 1999, three students — Jahn, Randa Chahoud, and Dennis Jacobsen — at The Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin got together and created a wild and witty (but extremely minimal) short film based on Lem’s stories. It won the audience award at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival, and they followed it a year later with a second film. A few years later, they sold Ijon Tichy to German Television as a six-episode series of fifteen minute shows.
But the remarkable thing is that they kept the unique look of the original when they moved to television.
Well, no, what is even more remarkable is that the series somehow managed to be better than the original short films.
The series adds a new character, Tichy’s holographic assistant, Analoge Halluzinelle, played by Nora Tschirner, a cute, holographic girl Tichy has tinkered into existence from a collection of oddball bits and pieces in a dishwasher. You won’t find her in Lem’s stories but she has been remarkably well written and gets some of the best moments. Halluzinelle struggles to obey Tichy’s often poorly conceived orders, and to understand the universe around her, while at the same time becoming willful and stubborn. Her finest moment comes when she objects to Tichy entering her in a robot contest because she clearly is not a robot, although I’ll admit that I enjoyed far more the nicely feminine moment when Ijon’s latest plan has resulted in a creating a copy of Halluzinelle and she takes a sly sideways look to check out her copy’s butt before taking a glance at her own.
Holding everything together is Oliver Jahn’s performance as Ijon, who is likeable and sympathetic as he bumbles his way through one absurd situation after another, even if we all realize that he is a bit of a phony.
Or, at least, a braggart.
While it isn’t obvious to those who do not speak German (like myself) Tichy has an odd, Eastern European accent and makes occasional grammatical errors. However, even if you are watching him with subtitles, Jahn gives a great, comic performance in a voice which doesn’t match what we hear in the behind the scenes videos. It doesn’t so much match the heroic version Tichy the narrator presents in the stories, but instead the shabby reality we all know is beneath it.
It is the constant comic inventiveness and the lovingly silly details that enhance so many of these stories — like the robot with a phone on its head that is the way it communicates with others — which really makes it all work. There are also a lot of Easter Egg references to other classic science fiction stories, and a very cool — and very memorable — score, which also includes a lot of little references, like the frequent references to Also Sprach Zarathustra.
It all gets summed up best of all in the running gag that ends all the episodes, a line borrowed from one of Lem’s stories, but which serves just as well as a punchline for all of them, when Tichy tells us that a lot of people refuse to believe him, or claim that he secretly drinks while on long spaceflights.
They just aren’t willing to believe the simple and unvarnished truth.
The series proved so popular that German TV station ZDF commissioned a second season which debuted in 2011. This time around the episodes were longer — 23 minutes — and they made a total of eight episodes. As Oliver Jahn had moved out of his old apartment by then, they had to recreate the apartment on a sound stage. They also added a few more creatures, including their dog-like companion, Mel, and while the spaceships retained their made from junk origins, some of the backgrounds are fancier and there appears to be more CGI.
These episodes are a lot harder to find online and are no longer available from ZDF. Supposedly the German DVD includes subtitles, but it is not readily available, either.
Oh, well, I’ll catch up with them sooner or later.
But I have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation about the second season: after all, their first season is so good it is hard to see how anyone can measure up to it.
Even the original creators.
However, now that a decade has passed with no sign of it, I’m afraid we will never get to see the feature film version Oliver Jahn wanted to make…
rivets on the poster 
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