How’s this for reaching into the cob-webbed bag of arcane source material and pulling out a shiny gem of a TV-to-movie adaptation? Mr. Peabody & Sherman comes from the beloved but largely-forgotten animated TV series Peabody’s Improbable History, that originally aired in the late 1950s and early ‘60s as a segment of the Jay Ward-produced Rocky and Friends and The Bullwinkle Show. The new film updates the classic dog-and-his-boy story for contemporary audiences with eye-popping 3-D animation, wacky characters, and a warm-hearted time-travel story. Still intact though, are those wonderful Peabody puns and the clever humor that appeals to adults while never talking down to kids.

We learn via snappy flashback that Mr. Peabody (voiced by Modern Family’s Ty Burrell), bow-tied inventor, philosopher, and the most accomplished dog in the world, adopted young Sherman (voiced by Max Charles) as a human infant who was left abandoned on his doorstep. Although he possesses the genius of Einstein, the bravado of Indiana Jones, and the wit of Oscar Wilde, there’s one thing Mr. Peabody has yet to master: how to be a good parent to his adopted son. He tries very hard but just hasn’t quite figured out the human emotional aspects of parenthood. In fact, when Sherman tells his father he loves him, Peabody is only able to muster, “I have a deep regard for you as well” in response.

One of Mr. Peabody’s particularly unorthodox child-rearing methods is to take his son on adventures across time via a time-machine he calls the WABAC (pronounced Wayback), an apple-red orb that shoots from the top of their penthouse apartment, then whizzes back though the ages so he can teach his son about history.

Trouble ensues, however, when Sherman tries to impress his bratty school nemesis, Penny (Ariel Winter) with a ride in the WABAC that ends with dire consequences when the pair find themselves running rampant through Ancient Egypt, The Renaissance, and the Trojan War.  They narrowly escape danger but encounter an interesting group of historical figures along the way.

Craig Wright’s crafty script moves along briskly, making great use of the historical settings without overstaying the welcome. Sherman and Penny’s fish-out-of-water story is always played to great pun-ny humor (one about Marie Antoinette goes over particularly well when it is declared that she “can’t have her cake and edict too”), but the time travel idea and “Improbable History” gag probably work best in smaller episodic doses -- like the original cartoon shorts, but there’s always Wright’s heart-warming father/son story to bring the proceedings back to life.

The story’s villain comes in the form of Miss Grunion (voiced by Allison Janney) from the Bureau of Child Safety and Protection whose bark is as painful as her bite. Miss Grunion claims to only be working in the best interest of the children, but she is actually a by-the-numbers battle-ax who believes a dog is unfit to parent a human child and will stop at nothing to take Sherman away from Mr. Peabody.

The animation in Mr. Peabody & Sherman is top-notch and actually benefits from the 3D treatment, particularly during the time-travel sequences when the WABAC zooms through wormholes and riffs in the time-space continuum to its destination. Wright’s whip-smart humor is loaded with plenty of masterful bon mots that entertain the adults while keeping the kiddos in giggly stitches. By no means do the guffaws come at a Shrek-like tempo and neither does the story have quite the emotional penetration as nearly anything from Pixar, but the film’s central message about learning to give up control of our children and how families can grow closer through adversity is enough to get the job done.

(Released by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and rated “PG” for some mild action and brief rude humor.)

Review also posted at www.franksreelreviews.com.