I've lost track — has the History Channel tacked the Cold War in all its serpentine scheming and strategems? My shelves ran out of space for their multi-volume VHS box sets years ago. Meanwhile, the documentary Sputnik Mania tries, with mixed success, to extract a single, coherent theme from deep within the intricate US-USSR maze of feints and counter-thrusts. It's kind of like a spy removing the delicate circuitry from a captured Russkie gadget to send back to Langley for analysis; lots of tangents and sidebars trailing off like clumsily-detached wires and trailing micro-circuit boards.

The topic: when the Soviet Union scored by being first in outer space, with the successful Oct. 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, the first manmade orbiting satellite. Essentially a metal sphere holding a radio, Sputnik took the west by surprise. The tiny dot, beeping inscrutably, was visible at night passing over a suddenly vulnerable Eisenhower-era United States. The triumph of science and human striving gave way instantly to military challenges, threats and propaganda (fair-minded narrative approach finds guilt a-plenty on both sides).

Documentarian David Hoffman, inspired by Paul Dickson's nonfiction book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, has a daunting amount of material to summarize (or ignore) here — the involvement of ex-Nazi rocket scientists, the bomb-shelter mentalities, the Soviets putting the first man into space with Yuri Gagarin — topics all worth docu-features themselves. Sputnik Mania gains altitude from its media-montage of tabloids, Bible-thumpers, pandering politicos, alarmist newsreels, civil-defense films, novelty songs, cartoons and Hollywood B-movies that exploited "Sputnik mania" to the maximum (but the anti-nuke docu-classic The Atomic Café did it too, and better). In just a matter of weeks the Russians scored again and again, putting a larger Sputnik 2, then a live dog into space. I never realized until I saw this that animal-rights activists worldwide were horrified — a rare cosmic alignment with the right wing.

In one priceless vintage clip, young airman John Glenn salutes the Soviet achievement. Most of the material is less conciliatory, though, as Yanks feared the atheist-commie-rat-bastard Reds would be sending H-bombs over next (anxiety not dispelled by a gleeful Nikita Krushchev, whose son is interviewed here), that the Sputnik's radio signal was some diabolical Bolshevik "code," that American science lagged hopelessly behind. Humiliating failure, initially, in trying to match the Russians seemed to confirm this last one, and the superpower arms race rose to new heights. Lessons, class? The obvious one is that exaggerated angst over "weapons of mass destruction" affecting public policy is nothing new. That Sputnik didn't lead straight to atomic holocaust is attributed to 1950s Washington and Moscow leadership; for all the rhetoric, Ike and Nikita were war vets with no illusions about how serious the stakes were (what does that say for Obama vs. McCain?) and when to cool it down. And that hysterical propaganda flicks are fun, if edited together with a snappy pace. Can't wait to see what documentarians 50 years from now will make out of our "war on terror."

Sputnik Mania: 8:40 p.m. Sunday, July 13 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.