While watching a science fiction film on television many, many years ago, I realized that, despite its unique title, I had seen “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women” before. And yet I hadn’t. I marveled at familiar scenes depicting decidedly un-lantern-jawed astronauts exploring a fog-shrouded Venusian beach teeming with alien plants.

Even on my family’s black-and-white Zenith, this planetscape was spectacularly detailed and realistic. New to me was an incompressible parallel story line involving chanting seaweed-clad cavewomen on a very different, obviously earthbound beach.

What I was in fact watching was footage that the American producer Roger Corman had acquired from a 1961 Soviet science fiction film titled “Planet of Storms” (“Planeta Burr” to the folks in Moscow). With characteristic frugality, Mr. Corman gave a young critic named Peter Bogdanovich his first directorial assignment shooting the water-logged cheesecake wraparounds of Mamie Van Doren that would justify the new title that had lured me in.The Russian footage looked familiar because Mr. Corman had already used it once in a film I’d seen on a previous rainy afternoon (that time fortified with Basil Rathbone in a lab coat) titled “Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.”

Starting Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will showcase more than two dozen Soviet science fiction and fantasy films under the banner “From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema,” including Pavel Klushantsev’s 1961 “Planet of Storms”(August 12, 16 & 17) in its pre-Corman form.Thanks to Mr. Corman’s thrifty showmanship, I had, by age 9, enjoyed two tastes of Russian Fantastik.

“Russian Fantastik is a kind of sprawling genre that incorporates science fiction, fantasy, and horror,” Robert Skotak, co-programmer (with Alla Verlsovsky and the American Cinemateque’s Dennis Bartok) of the retrospective, said. Mr. Skotak’s interest in this little-known (in the West, anyway) area of world cinema also has its roots in childhood TV viewing.

“I saw an excerpt from an earlier Klushatsev film, ‘Road to the Stars,’ on the old Walter Cronkite show ‘The Twentieth Century,’ he said. “The special effects were phenomenal — condensed, visionary, realistic — totally unlike anything I was seeing in American science fiction films at that time.”

Mr. Skotak is uniquely qualified to advocate the technical craftsmanship of Russian Fantastik films. He is himself a talented effects artist and filmmaker. If you’ve seen “Titanic,” “Aliens,” or “Galaxy of Terror,” you’ve seen his work.

Though many were box-office hits in their native Russia, and some — like Andrei Tarkovsky’s gloriously melancholy 1972 space fugue “Solaris” (August 18) and the mind-roasting 1972 mythic spectacle “Ruslan and Ludmilla” (August 16, 17 & 20) — have cult followings in America, the majority of the films in the program at the Walter Reade Theater were never distributed in the West. Most remain scarce, and information on their creators has been even scarcer, transforming Mr. Skotak’s early enthusiasm into something of a crusade.

In the 1980s he began corresponding with Russian science fiction fans, bartering American pop music and film memorabilia for Russian Fantastik video dubs, film posters, and any information that would broaden his understanding of this unique phenomenon. Eventually Mr. Skotak was able to contact several filmmakers, like the “Planet of Storms” director, Mr. Klushantsev, who helped define the aesthetics of space travel for a nation during the era of Sputnik.Mr. Skotak is currently hard at work on what promises to be the definitive documentary film on the subject, “Red Fantasies,” and he’ll be on hand at the Walter Reade to introduce several screenings.

Russian narrative traditions have deep ties to folklore, and the filmmakers who created Russian Fantastik were naturally driven to tell stories and conjure speculative visions that would provoke and entertain. But they did so within a state-controlled industry that frowned on entertainment and spectacle as anything other than a means to a propagandistic end. The Soviet film industry’s official creative agenda demanded “social realism” — films that take a responsible, here-and-now approach to drama and storytelling.What use is a fanciful tale of utopia when we live in a worker’s paradise?

This tension between the Soviet state’s desire to curb the fantastic impulse and the Russian public’s insatiable need for myth challenged Soviet filmmakers’ ingenuity. The 1936 film “Cosmic Voyage” (August 20, 21 & 24), for instance, tempered its prescient take on the conquest of space with an indictment of bureaucrats in the Moscow Institute of Interplanetary Travel, as well as rocket ships patriotically named Stalin and Voroshilov.

“Aelita, Queen of Mars,” (August 16), from 1924 — the year of Lenin’s death — played both sides by blending jaw-dropping futuristic design with street-level Russian humor in a story of two pioneering Soviet space travelers who become reluctant guests of a corrupt Martian matriarchy.Is it a spoiler to say that Soviet values triumph over monarchy in the end? In real life, the decadent queen would have the last laugh. The film (and novel upon which it was based) became so popular in the motherland that thousands of Russian parents in the 1920s and 1930s named their baby girls Aelita.

Through August 24 (Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65th St., between Broadway and Amsterdam, 212-496-3809).