To my eternal gratitude, my eldest child slid out his mother’s birth canal a year or two tardy to fall victim to the late-’90s Barney indoctrination. Something about that PBS peppy purple dinosaur seemed … off.

Casper Kelly, subversive mastermind behind the Adult Swim classic Too Many Cooks, knows this. With Buddy, he explores what you always suspected lingering somewhere within those too-perfect wooden fences: fodder for a potential Dateline NBC investigation.

Buddy’s Barney is, duh, Buddy, an orange unicorn with a pear-shaped middle and the voice of Keegan-Michael Key (2015’s Vacation). As his theme song goes, he’s huggy and a li’l bit nutty. His show is your usual Easter egg-colored fantasia of cute kids, anthropomorphic objects, dance parties, safety tips, gaslighting, murder plots and — with the second act’s hard left turn around the block, onto the highway and off the ramp into everyday suburbia — existential crises.

To know any more is to deny yourself the pleasure of discovery. Admittedly, I was reluctant because while Kelly excels in short-form (e.g., the Cheddar Goblin commercial in Mandy, a segment of V/H/S Halloween), I found his first movie, the Adult Swim Yule Log parody, tiresome — inventive, yes, but tiresome, inevitably by nature of the format spoofed. With Buddy, he’s calculated how to sustain his unique stamp of surreality for the duration of a feature. Although the final showdown remains 10 minutes overdrawn, this black comedy is ingenious, unpredictable (mostly) and alarmingly funny, with the kid actors tuned in to its weirdo wavelength; lead Delaney Quinn (The Roses) is going places.

Barney may be the dead-center target, yet Buddy couldn’t exist as is without the crown jewel of children’s programming, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Kelly owes a sizable debt to that series’ production design and puppetry. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Kelly swiped the backpack, Strappy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), straight from the Playhouse closet coat rack. Thanks to the leeway of an R rating, Kelly gets away with things CBS would never allow Paul Reubens to attempt, like a Michael Shannon-voiced ventriloquist’s dummy making out with a disheveled, bare-bellied drifter played by Clint Howard — in front of children, no less!

America, we must protect Casper Kelly at all costs. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Aug. 28