At their best, puppets are engaging, enlightening and entertaining—and so is this hour-long examination of the history of puppetry in the U.S. It’s a compact history lesson, illustrated with copious archival footage, from Edison’s 1898 film Dancing Chinamen Marionettes to early TV’s ventriloquist Paul Winchel to the inevitable Muppets. The program documents how each innovation in the field was a transformative milestone building on what came before it. It also demonstrates how the dreamlike reality created with puppetry gives the medium freedom to comment on the times. The fun comes from seeing the puppets in action, particularly in the expanded clips appended as bonus chapters.

Shelf Talk: The American Puppet won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing when it aired on PBS in 2000, which is nice but it will do little to draw attention to the film. And though narrator Dan Lauria works steadily in TV and features, he’s still best known for The Wonder Years. Go for the nostalgia angle and push it to educators, history buffs and those customers who know the difference between Rootie Kazootie and Lamb Chop.