I’ve always had a fondness for one of the first PG movies from Walt Disney, Midnight Madness. Like a It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for the Mickey Mouse-derived teen set, it involves color-coded college students scurrying around L.A., looking for a big prize.

As the catchy theme song (“When midnight madness starts to get to you!”) begins to play, a couple of PG-rated buxom roller-skaters pass out invitations to the game. It’s all part of a called “the Great All-Nighter” or something to that effect.

The teams include:
• some Regular Joes, led by David “I’m a Pepper” Naughton
• the slobs, led by Stephen “I’m a Flounder” Furst
• the nerds, led by Eddie “The Deez” Deezen
• the jocks, led by Dirk “Dan Blocker’s Kid” Blocker
• and the Nameless Tomboy Crew, complete with two big-boned girls sitting in the back of a truck while eating many, many snacks.

The game is orchestrated by the PG-rated slovenly gamemaster Leon, who I think runs a cult because he not only has the buxom sexpots as his slaves, but a whole cadre of old-timers with cartoonish voices who stay up with him as they learn more about the game and, I assume, Leon’s teachings.

The assembled teams gather around L.A. sights and sounds like the Griffith Observatory, where a PG-rated big-breasted woman is ogled though a telescope; and Johnie’s Fatboy Burgers, where a PG-rated big-breasted woman gets splooshed by condiments and other liquids.

In addition, there’s a trip to the Pabst Blue Ribbon factory, where a guy drowns in a vat of beer; a piano museum, where a debuting Michael J. Fox joins in the “fun”; and Pinball City, where a Western-coded Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman) is the change boy with a six-shooter that dispenses quarters.

After a few racist jokes directed at Mexicans and metal detectors, they converge at the stately Bonaventure Hotel, where the lax security allows every team to wear bellhop costumes, play around with the elevators, and, why not, unsafely use a high-pressure water hose to thwart those pesky security guards.

And “FAGABEEFE” — if you know, you know.

Though I hadn’t seen Midnight Madness since the ’80s on a weathered VHS, I watched it almost every day that summer, instilling lifelong memories about the sanitized L.A. scene, mostly involving cheating with a late-’70s supercomputer that melts a bag of marshmallows and, more to the point, having a heart-to-heart with Michael J. Fox and forgetting his birthday.

Sure, it’s truly lame, but I will never cop to that; I still have singular fandom for it and will watch it every so often when no one else is around. That being said, maybe I can come out of the closet if Disney ever does a five-part retrospective on its impact, culture and legacy … but, I’m guessing, that will never happen. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

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.