Professor Astral Sternu Tarantoga

Tag Area: Fictional Character
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Czarna komnata profesora Tarantogi

  • Professor Tarantoga's black room
  • by Stanisław Lem
  • in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963) [Published as a TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) the year before the 1964 Polish TV broadcast.]
Professor Tarantoga saves human civilization! After using his chronopad to investigate the leading scientists and artists in history, Tarantoga concludes that without exception they are lazy drunkards. So naturally, he sends smart young people into various eras to invent differential calculus, to paint the Mona Lisa, etc.—all while a pair of police inspectors have their eye on him. —based on Wikipedia
A pencil sketch of an odd bird standing on the head of a dog-like robot with a full moon in the sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Dziwny gość profesora Tarantogi

  • Professor Tarantoga’s strange guest
  • by Stanisław Lem
  • in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963) [Published as a TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) eight years before the 1971 Polish TV broadcast.]
I’d bet my last złotych that Lem is carefully satirizing the rule of the Polish United Workers’s Party in this story of a fourth-millennium man who hails from Mars and has room in his brain for two or three different personalities (Kazimierz Nowak, Hipperkorn, and possibly a dreaded Nanów), the first of which leapt from a touring chronobus in the 20th century where he hoped to find the inventor of time travel, Professor Tarantoga. —Michael Main
W kilku słowach: w naszym społeczeñstwie decyduje o losie człowieka ranga intelektualna. Ludzie wartoœciowi, o zdolnoœciach wybitnych, mają prawo do całego, własnego ciała. Ja właœnie byłem takim, byłem samodzielnym, suwerennym meżczyznę!
translate Briefly, in our society the fate of a person depends on his intellectual level. Valuable people with outstanding abilities have the right to their entire body. I was just that, I was an independent, sovereign man!
A pencil sketch of an odd bird standing on the head of a dog-like robot with a full moon in the sky.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Wyprawa profesora Tarantogi

  • Professor Tarantoga’s voyage
  • by Stanisław Lem
  • in Noc księżycowa (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963) [Published as a TV script (“widowisko telewizyjne”) 19 years before the 1964 Polish TV broadcast.]
Oh, tensor! Oh, turbulent perturbation! Some time before Professor Tarantoga invented a time machine and met a schizophrenic man from the fourth millennium, he apparently invented a transporter that took him and his new assistant Chybek to a series of progressively more advanced civilizations, the last of which included a barefaced cook who had an embarrasing accident in the cosmic kitchen, resulting in mankind (and indirectly resulting in time travel for the professor and Chybek). —Michael Main
I znów mi się przypaliło—jedno spiralne ramie, od spodu, na trzysta parseków—i znowu wybiegła mi słonecznica, i ścięło się, i będzie zgęstek, i powstanie białko, przeklęte białko! I znowu będzie ewolucja, i ludzkość, i cywilizacja, i będę się musiał tłumaczyć, usprawiedliwiać, składać we dwoje, przepraszać, że to niechcący, że przez przypadek . . . Ale to wy, nie ja!
translate And I got burned again—one spiral arm, underneath, three hundred parsecs—and again a sunflower came out of me and it was choked and there will be a bundle of white, cursed protein! And there will be evolution again, and humanity and civilization, and I will have to justify, justify, put together, apologize that it’s accidentally, that by accident . . .
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Die seltsamen Begegnungen des Prof. Tarantoga

  • The strange encounters of Professor Tarantoga
  • [writer unknown], directed by Charles Kerremans
  • (ZDF, West Germany, 4 December 1978)
We have no details on the German remake of Wyprawa profesora Tarantogi except that Lem adaptation was humorless. —Michael Main
No image currently available.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Lem’s Star Diaries

Professor Tarantoga und sein seltsamer Gast

According to Fernsehen der DDR, the German adaptation of Lem’s script finds the science-obsessed Professor Tarantoga with a strange guest who calls himself Novak (or maybe Hipperkorn) and claims to hail from fourth-millennium Mars where he quulles. part from the bit about quuelling, this certainly sounds like the 1963 Polish script that we read, but we don't know whether it was expanded or revised. —based on Ffernsehen der DDR
Volkmar Kleinert (as Novak-Kleinert) and Eberhard Esche (as Professor Tarantoga) are in deep conversation behind a lab bench loaded with glassware and other equipment.
  • Science Fiction
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel