WMG / Puppet History

The Professor is an immortal puppet-like being.

He appears in a black-and-white photo with Kate Warne and says the wine in Ancient Pompeii caused wicked hangovers, then follows both up with Suspiciously Specific Denial. He didn't study history to get his degree - he lived through it.

• Probably Jossed. The second season finale implies he's using a time machine to see history first-hand and meet these figures.
• The "immortal" part is jossed as he died in the Season 4 finale and is considered as "canonically dead" in the Holiday 2021 special.

The Professor is a Time Lord.

Wears a bowtie, seems to be immortal and has knowledge of terrible events. Also has a leggy companion behind the scenes/TARDIS and a snarky tagalong here for the ride.

• The second season finale reveals the whole business with the Genie involved a wish to turn a random object into a time machine so... this is actually looking fairly plausible.
  • The fourth season episode about Mansa Musa Has him say that when he dies he'll be reborn in a new physical form that might be a bit bigger AKA he'll regenerate

Future episode guesses.

Place your bets on what events The Professor will cover here.

• Mithridates VI, the Pontic king who made himself immune to a bunch of poisons to protect against assassination attempts.
  • Relatedly, Roman Master Poisoner Locusta, who supposedly took part in the assassinations of Emperors Claudius and Britannicus.
• That time Julius Caesar got kidnapped by pirates.
• Anything to do with Alice Roosevelt.
• Anything about the real Annie Oakley.
• The life and crimes of Elizabeth Báthory.
• The real story of Mata Hari.
• The life of Julie d'Aubigny
  • Confirmed; "The Scandalous Life of France's Bisexual Opera Icon" (season 6, episode 4) is about her.
• Inês de Castro, a Galician noblewoman who was the posthumously-recognized wife of King Peter I of Portugal.
• Jeanne de Clisson ("the Lioness of Brittany"), a former noblewoman who became a pirate to avenge her husband after he was executed for treason by the French king.
• Bass Reeves, the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River commonly believed to be the inspiration for The Lone Ranger.
• Eugene Bullard, "The Black Swallow of Death" and the first African-American military pilot who flew for France during World War I.
• Juan Pujol García, a Catalan spy who created an elaborate fake spy ring to feed the Nazis false information during World War II.
• Zhuge Liang, the "Crouching Dragon" and an early Chinese politician, military strategist, writer, engineer and inventor.
• The Beast of Gévaudan.
  • Confirmed; Episode 1 of Season 3 is about the Beast.
• The Bone Wars
• The 1980s kidnapping of director Shin Sang-Ok and his wife Choi Eun-Hee by North Korea to create films for their film industry.
• Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, the Translyvanian aristocrat, paleontologist, and WWI spy.
• Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico
• The multiple thefts/attempts to destroy the Ghent Altarpiece over its 600 years of existence, along with the fact that its painter, Jan van Eyck, may have been a spy.
• The story of Dante Aligheri and his exile from Florence, which led him to write the Divine Comedy, with all the people he didn't like going to Hell, which will tie into Dorothy Ruth's storyline as she descends into Hell to rescue her beloved Stanley.

The Professor was cursed by a Jackass Genie.

Hence why said, "It's not whimsical, it's devastating." when Kristin questioned his use of "a fickle genie who keeps making things worse" as an answer in the 1904 Olympics episode.

• As of "The Grisly Journey of The Donner Party" this one is looking Confirmed. Given the tangent it seems that the Genie's curse is "being a total prick about The Professor's wish".
  • Maybe the Genie turned him into a puppet? He does say how much he hates being small...
    • It goes by very fast, but the Professor states in the tangent where he reveals all of this that the cave containing the genie could only be accessed by someone "roughly the size of a human hand" so he was already a puppet prior to meeting the genie.

The third season finale will be about...

• Catherine the Great, because the musical guest is a horse, and there's an apocryphal story about Catherine dying while having sex with one.
• Sergeant Reckless, a Korean racing horse bought by the U.S. Army during the Korean War as a pack horse that quickly became beloved by her platoon and is a two-time purple heart recipient. More details can be found here.
• Babe Ruth. The sponsor break for the Ching Shih episode shows that the horses partner is named Dorothy Ruth, also the name of one of Ruth's daughters who raised Arabian Horses.
• All of these are Jossed; the third season finale was about the Great Molasses Flood.

The Horse won't actually be the musical guest for the Season 3 finale, or at least not the only musical guest.

• The newsletter sent out after the Ching Shih episode claims that the next episode will feature the Horse as a musical guest (and thus be the finale), yet there's still one puppet on the poster that hasn't performed a song or featured in any way: God. It's possible that the reason the Horse has been hyped up all season is so a comedic Bait-and-Switch can be pulled in the finale, with God taking his place instead. Alternatively, the episode could be on a topic that covers both horses and religion (such as horse worship or Incitatus, a horse which Caligula supposedly made a priest), leading to God taking offense at not being invited to sing and the Horse turning his song into a duet so they can both perform.
• Confirmed; while the first half of the song is only the Horse singing, the second half is a duet between him and God after he dies in the Molasses Flood.

Guesses of The Professor's identity in Season 5.

As shown in the premier episode of Season 5, there are things that seems... off about The Professor. Unexplained Recovery aside, fans point out some clues regarding him: His fur is paler, he has a rather unsettling desire to eat meat and flesh, a strange box appeared and has a cable attached to the side of the theater (The Professor vehemently refuses anyone to refer or touch it), etc. There's also the fact that the Professor wants Ryan to win every single episode regardless of the algorithm to give him a moisturizer, which he keeps on insisting Ryan to put it on. You can guess who's The Professor this season here.

• A hologram/AI, presumably powered by the box. Fans notice he is occasionally glitching out.
  • In the episode about the Trung sisters, he starts to refer to himself as "this holo-" before Verbal Backpedaling.
  • Finally confirmed as of "The Bloody Life of England's Fastest Surgeon."
• A ghost. In the debut episode, there's noise of presumably something falling at some point, then Ryan hears another one which was replayed Ghost Files style.
• The genie/the Devil/Asmodeus in disguise. A demonic distorted voice is sometimes heard and overlap The Professor's own.
• An animatronic copy of the Professor that's inaccurate since the people who made it didn't pay attention to previous episodes, so they got the fur color wrong and mistook the running gag as "B-boys" rather than "C-dogs".

If possible, The Genie will refuse to grant hologram!Professor’s wish.

The Holo-Professor will grab the lamp and make his wishes and either refuse to grant his wishes or, if forced to grant them, twist them enough to make him regret it and recant his wishes.

• Jossed; Ryan throws the Holo-Professor to a grandfather clock which temporarily knocks him out, then manages to grab the lamp and wishes the Professor (along with his adoptive parents in tow) to return to the present just before the meteor struck the Cretaceous. The Genie grants his wish, but not before messing with him a little by pretending to be unsure whether his wish works or not.

The Genie isn't all bad.

When The Professor returned in the Season Five finale, he had his dino parents with him. Ryan would've had no way of knowing about them, so he couldn't have wished for them to be rescued. Perhaps the Genie decided to Pet the Dog and bring then along out of kindness towards the dinosaurs and/or The Professor.

The Genie isn't the one who brought back The Professor and his parents.

As pointed out in the above WMG, Ryan had no way of knowing about either Dinosir or Dinosara, making it impossible for him to have wished them back as well. This, combined with the fact that the Genie claims not to know why the wish seemingly didn't work, makes it suspect as to whether the wish was granted at all or if some other force brought The Professor and his parents back. Interestingly enough, at the very end of The Professor and the Chicxulub asteroid's song the Asmodeus motif can be heard - could Asmodeus or his boss, Satan, have brought back the three of them?

The ripple effects of the Professor's wish have gone beyond the Genie's ability to contain

Throughout seasons 2-4, increasing lore dropped that not only has the Professor been able to take a jaunt through history, his adventures have created disturbances in the fabric of reality, bringing objects to life as the singing guests each episode, whom God and Satan eventually had to gather in the Wondrium Arena's purgatory. Part of the genie's motivation for revenge on the Professor was to set right what had gone wrong and prevent further damage. However, despite all this, seasons 5 and 6 continue to have singing guests. Plus, sending the Professor back in time seemingly morphed his dinosaur parents and even the Chicxulub Asteroid into puppet-form. This would suggest that, wherever the Professor is the fabric of reality gets altered for the fuzzier just from his very proximity.

Related to the above, the Genie's vengeance was a case of Revenge Before Reason that will bite him in the ass

If the whole point of stopping the Professor's time travel was to prevent the creation of more 'singing abominations', then why would his revenge involve yet more time travel?

• Alternative to the above, when Asmodeus possessed the Professor, he deliberately phrased the wish in a way that would force the Genie to further damage the time stream/reality, knowing that the Genie would be forced to obey the wish to the letter. Why? For the Evulz because he's Always Chaotic Evil

Dorothy Ruth has plans for revenge.

During seasons 5 and 6, Dorothy Ruth the horse has been doing almost all of the ad reads and, in doing so, has referred several times to the loss of her horse husband in the Boston Molasses Flood as well as her dive back into the dating scene. Come season 6, she's engaged to a new stud but doesn't seem to be quite over her last relationship. In the episode about Cesare Borgia, her new fiancé does the ad read and comments that, despite their upcoming nuptials, he hasn't seen Dorothy Ruth in weeks. Something's up...