Puppet History

Puppet History is an American comedy game show YouTube series created by Shane Madej and produced by Madej, Ryan Bergara, and Steven Lim. The show premiered on January 10, 2020, on the Watcher Entertainment YouTube channel.
The show's premise sees a colorful puppet historian known as the Professor presenting a game show about one or two distinctive persons or events from history. The two contestants answer questions, and the Professor gives them points; the contestant with the most points wins the title of "History Wizard" and a hat. Before season six, the contestant with the most points won the title of "History Master" and a small trophy.
The show received an Honoree Award at the 2022 Webby Awards for a Science & Education Channel.
The show begins with the Professor, a blue puppet, greeting the guests from a puppet theater stage. The contestants are almost always Ryan Bergara and another special guest. The Professor then tells a story about a historical event or figure. He stops every few minutes to ask the two guests questions; whoever answers correctly, or as close to correctly as possible, receives points (referred to as "jelly beans").
The scoring is relatively loose, and a contestant may be awarded more than one point, or just half a point, for their answer, as well as extra points being awarded as the Professor sees fit. The show presents parts of the story and answers to some questions through reenactments of scenes using paper cutouts of people from history. The prize is a small plastic trophy containing jelly beans or another small prize. The Professor refers to it as the 'coveted cup and title of History Master.'
The Professor encourages the guests to tell jokes and is often more attentive towards the guests than to Bergara, often awarding points to guests with jokes. Points are also awarded to drawings on the whiteboards on which the answers are written, regardless of whether or not the answer is correct. Before the end of the show, the Professor leaves to "tally the score" using "our complex victory algorithm," and another puppet or puppets come onto the stage and sing a song about the historical event.
For the first four seasons, the Professor claimed that the algorithm awarded the cup and title of "History Master" to the guest contestants, regardless of who actually acquired more points. In season five, this trend was inverted, and Bergara won almost every episode (with the exception of episode six) regardless of his point total. However, due to a "supply chain issue" in sourcing the trophies, Bergara instead won a Puppet History-themed moisturizer every episode (except episode 5, when a "Yankee Dodge"-flavored vape was presented as prize). This is later revealed to be a plot by the Professor, later revealed to be an evil holographic doppelganger, to steal Bergara's flesh and use it as a body.
In season six, the algorithm machine was destroyed and replaced by the Professor's adoptive dinosaur parents who serve as judges and hand out hats as prizes, referred to as the "coveted cap and title of History Wizard". The guests receive a hat with the words "history wizard" written on it, while Bergara receives a hat saying "beef," with misspellings thereof. In season seven the Professor uses a "very simple tally" to calculate the scores, and the prize was changed from a hat to amnesiac pills called "Phorgedytol", referred to as the "coveted capsules and title of History Wizard", this is later revealed to be a plot by an evil puppet version of Pythagoras to make them ignore his murder of the character, "Estranged Producer Shane Madej" (played by himself).
The Professor is a small hand puppet with blue fur and a white nose. He usually wears a safari hat and jacket and carries a satchel. He wears glasses and a bow tie. Sometimes, he wears other costumes. For example, in the episode about Ching Shih, he wore a three-cornered pirate hat, and in the episode about the 1904 Summer Olympics he wears a women's gymnastics leotard. As shown in seasons 5 and 7, his name is most likely Concupiscence "Connie" McNasty.
Originally an educational game show, the show developed deep lore over time. From seasons 1 to 3, The Professor sometimes talked about his life through wrong answers to the multiple-choice questions. These answers say the Professor found a magic lamp that had a magical genie inside it. He wished for the genie to turn a "seemingly ordinary household object," revealed to be the Professor's satchel, into a secret time machine. The genie did so, but was also "a total prick about it." In other episodes, the Professor mentions visiting the past and meeting people from history. At times he talks about the genie chasing him through time, due to the effects from time-traveling bringing the various singing guest puppets to life.
In Season 4, the Professor declares he has placed a restraining order on the Genie, and there will be no genie lore revealed in the answers for the season. In the last episode of Season 4, the Professor goes back in time to the Cretaceous period due to a conspirancy involving Ryan Bergara, Asmodeus, Satan and the genie. A T-rex eats him. Words on the screen tell the audience that the Professor is canonically dead. In the Puppet History Holiday Spectacular, many of the puppets seen earlier in the show acknowledge his death and sing a song in his honor.
It is revealed in season 5, the Professor is somehow alive, and the puppet theater is connected to a mysterious electronic box which he warns the guests not to touch or talk about. He is later revealed to be a hologram originally created by the cycloptic purple puppet version of God to deliver the Professor's eulogy, but elected by the puppets to host the show. The real Professor is revealed to have somehow revived, albeit much larger, and hatched from an egg laid by the T-rex that ate him, who is married to some kind of pterosaur. The holographic Professor revealed his plans of skinning Ryan and wearing his flesh in order to rub the genie lamp and wish for world domination. The two fought and Ryan rubbed the genie lamp to bring the Professor and his new dinosaur parents from the Cretaceous period just as the meteor is about to strike, and kills the hologram by defenestration.
The Professor made a full return to host in the sixth season, with the hologram machine destroyed. The genie is completely absent from this season.
In the seventh season "some kind of drama" is shown to have happened between the sixth and seventh seasons, wherein the "estranged producer" Shane Madej (portraying himself) is shown warning the Professor about "treacherous forces" that could threaten his life, before being "murdered in the street like a dog." The culprit is revealed to be Elmer Walter Williams, a horse who is attempting to marry Dorothy Ruth, wife of the deceased Stanley Melvin Murphy (another horse who died in the Great Molasses Flood), and his accomplice Dr. Hoagy Sprat of the Department of Puppet Safety, who claims Elmer is his "right hand man."
In the present, Dr. Sprat and Elmer are shown to have a machine used to kill the time-displaced singing guest puppets and the Professor's dinosaur parents without The Professor and Ryan noticing. An amnesiac drug called Phorgedytol is given out as a prize, presumably by Sprat and Elmer as a "sponsorship deal," leading Ryan and the Professor to forget about the earlier murder, as well as the obvious presence of a small shrine commemorating Shane.
Dorothy Ruth investigates the incidents and, after singing a dramatic breakup song to Elmer, eats pasta laced with the drug which causes her to forget that she broke up with him or that the show Puppet History even existed. It is hinted that Elmer is the mastermind and that Sprat is his flunkey, as Elmer mentions how Sprat complained to him about killing the puppets and watches slyly as the Professor's parents die in the machine. Ryan then discovers that the effects of Phorgedytol are reversed by taking the pill twice a day, and he and the Professor remember the murder of Shane, before discovering a seemingly brainwashed Dorothy celebrating her marriage with Elmer, and wonder what Elmer is plotting.
The Professor and Ryan speak to Shane's ghost, only to realize that he has gone insane. Shane reveals that Elmer shot him, but reveals no further details about his own murder, only about his memories with other historical figures. Despite being aware of his death, he is a disbeliever in ghosts who is unaware that he or any other historical figures he has spoken to are ghosts. The Professor and Ryan suggest drowning Elmer in molasses, just like Stanley before him.
Elmer was confronted in the room with the retirement machine with a briefcase of money and was about to be drowned with a hose connected to a big tank of molasses, but is revealed to be an inanimate puppet bought at a store, controlled by Sprat, who identifies himself as Pythagoras, having uncovered the key to immortality via the power of math after escaping his assassination attempt before finding out about the Professor's time traveling adventures throughout his long lifespan, ultimately discovering the show Puppet History and declaring a rivalry with the Professor as he had gathered as many followers as Pythagoras had in his cult whereas Pythagoras himself lived as a loner in a cave, vowing to stop him and establish him as superior genius by taking over the show. He reveals his plan, first by using the persona of Elmer to kill Shane, getting the crew high on drugs, faking the Department of Puppet Safety disguised as Hoagy Sprat, marrying and killing Dorothy Ruth to get her inheritance, and finally killing the Professor and Ryan, renaming the show to Puppet Mathematics. He succeeds in his plan, sending Ryan and the Professor to purgatory and teaching math to his inanimate puppets. While sifting through garbage among which lies the genie lamp, a rat accidentally revives Evil Hologram Professor.