When John Bennett was 8, he got a teddy bear for Christmas — and wished (oh, how he wished!) that his toy could be real, and that they could be friends forever and ever. Pretty cute, when he was 8. Not so cute when it came true. And pretty creepy more than 25 years later, as John has grown up into someone who hasn’t really grown up, and is still best pals with his real-life (and, by now, pretty foul-mouthed) talking toy.

It’s a pretty twisted idea for a movie — really, only half a step away from a mad Mel Gibson yakking to a furry puppet in "The Beaver." And if anyone is going to twist the idea further, it should be Seth MacFarlane.

Once you stop fighting him, Seth MacFarlane makes Ted really funny, whether romancing a trampy checkout girl at the supermarket, carousing with hookers, getting into a knock-down-drag-out brawl with Johnny over an insult, downing shots with Flash Gordon (which would take too long to explain). It's idiotic, but not any more so than, say, The Hangover's wrong-gone bachelor party.

And at heart, it's the same story, about that transition point where overgrown kids have to finally grow up but get sidetracked by one companion — a boorish, coarse, consistently inappropriate fuzzball who makes the growing up difficult.

Ted is profane enough that it's not a movie real kids should be allowed anywhere near. But it's also a date movie, and one that MacFarlane has somehow made safe for arrested-development types who wouldn't be caught dead at a date movie — let alone one about a girl, a guy and a teddy bear.