• monotremata@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    I think my top pick has to be Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot. I gather it’s pretty well known in Germany, but in the US pretty much no one has heard of it.

    It’s a sci-fi comedy, based loosely on The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem, who is one of my favorite authors. The first season was all web episodes made on a shoestring budget; the spaceship is just the main actor’s apartment for the interior, and a coffee press for the exterior. There’s also a lot of use of puppets and amusing costumes. It’s just incredibly creative. The stories involve things like Tichy’s navigation system malfunctioning, so he accelerates out of control around a gravitational anomaly and starts experiencing time slips. Which could be kind of convenient, because fixing the navigation is a two-person task, but the first time his future self asks for his help he thinks it’s a dream, and the second time he knows it’s real but won’t help because if they actually got it fixed then obviously his future self wouldn’t still be coming back in time to get his help, so what’s the point? etc. I know Lem isn’t the best-known sci fi writer these days, but it’s criminal that this show hasn’t gotten more attention.