Fountains of Youth in Live-Action TV series.
- 18 Again: The central premise is that struggling middle-aged adult Hong Daeyoung ends up turning back to eighteen and going to school with his kids to look after them as he grapples with the sudden change and self-improvement.
- The 4400: In "Daddy's Little Girl", it is revealed that Cora Tomkins, who disappeared in 1950, has the ability to produce a chemical which makes whoever drinks it younger. Richard wants for Isabelle to be able to start her life over without all of the guilt that she feels for the terrible things that she has done. To that end, he kidnaps her from Promise City and gives her the chemical in water. Overnight, she becomes about fourteen or fifteen years old. After another few hours, she is an eight-year-old and is already beginning to lose her memories, being unable to remember Shawn's name. Isabelle eventually decides to drink the rest of the chemical and reverts to about three, the age that she would be if not for her Plot-Relevant Age-Up. In the following episode "One of Us", Richard has Cora reverse the process.
- Bewitched: In one 1965 episode, "Junior Executive", Endora turns Darrin into a young boy. She does the same thing in 1971's "Out of the Mouths of Babes", though Darrin still has his adult voice. He has to talk in falsetto to keep the illusion. An additional episode, "Just a Kid Again", has a store clerk who wants to be a child again getting his wish.
- The short-lived American Saturday morning TV series Big John Little John revolved around an elementary school teacher who, after accidentally sipping from the Fountain of Youth, unexpectedly shifts from adult to child size and back again. Only his wife and teenage son know his secret and his younger self is passed off as a visiting relative while he tries to learn how to control the changes.
- In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Band Candy", all of the adults ingest chocolate bars that have spells inside of them that do not physically de-age the characters, but make them act as they had as teenagers. The episode is filled with hilarious examples of the Scoobies becoming more and more horrified by their parents, teachers, and even the stodgy Giles, as they act in irresponsible and (in the case of Giles) criminal ways.
- In Charmed (1998), one is being guarded by nymphs, but is really more of a Healing Spring. Another one shows up, and this one actually looks like a stone fountain. Irritatingly enough, Piper says "But that's just a myth!" when confronted with the second one, even after having come across the first one, possibly because she and her sisters had promised the nymphs from the first fountain that they would keep its existence a secret.
- Doctor Who:
- "The Time Monster" has Sergeant Benton temporally regressed to babyhood by a time-eating monster. He is eventually returned to adulthood, in front of everybody else, stark naked.
- "The Leisure Hive" ends with the villain Pangol reduced to infancy, and his mother Mena promises that she'll Raise Him Right This Time.
- "Boom Town": Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen is a member of the Slitheen family of the alien Raxacoricofallapatorian species. In the episode, is it explained that members of the family are raised from infancy to be sociopathic criminals. When Blon is exposed to the Heart of the TARDIS, it turns her into an egg; she will be returned to her planet's nurseries, where she will have a chance for a new life.
- "The Lazarus Experiment" is about the titular scientist inventing a device that restores cells to a previous state. Being an old man, he tries it on himself first, becoming young. That is until the horrible side effects of the device are discovered. The Master later uses the technology in reverse to make the Doctor old.
- In the Doom Patrol (2019) episode "Youth Patrol", Rita desperately tries to find a means of restoring her youth after seeing that losing her fragment of Immortus has caused her to show visible signs of age. She gets startled by Cliff walking in on her so much that she drops a youth potion, resulting in her, Cliff, Vic, Willoughby Kipling and Jane becoming teenagers. They later de-age further into children, with Jane being reduced to infancy by the end of the episode.
- In Dracula (2020), drinking blood keeps Dracula young. When we first see him, he appears sickly and old, but he quickly becomes a young man again due to Jonathan.
- Fantasy Island (2021): Ruby and Mel become young again on the island, as a result of her wish. They even get into a pool to do this. When their visit is over, Mel convinces Ruby to stay behind since she's dying of cancer, and still live indefinitely there in a young body. She agrees, and becomes Elena's assistant.
- In The Flying Cestmir, Cestmir gains seeds for six magical flowers. One of them causes people to de-age for a certain period of time until the effects wear off. The old professor uses it, but apparently nobody else does.
- Forever: In "Fountain of Youth" the drug "Aeterna" is introduced, advertised as making people younger...except people taking it are dying of horrific brain damage, like they have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and Huntington's all at once. The pure form of the drug actually works as advertised without any apparent side effects; it's just that using stem cells was too expensive. They started harvesting pituitary glands from human corpses, which was far cheaper but gave the patients a prion disease that basically ate holes in their brains.
- Happened in The Genie from Down Under, where Penelope, after abusing her long-suffering Genie, Bruce, with over 200 wishes in an hour, he intentionally made a wish of hers backfire, turning her into a baby. Oddly though, due to the nature of the wish, nobody seemed to be surprised by her age regression, as though she was supposed to be an infant.
- In the Haven episode "Reunion", the thirty-something Robert Taylor occasionally reverts to a teenager who goes on murderous rampages, then later wakes up as himself with no memory of what he had done. His teen self also has the ability to turn other people back into teenagers via touch.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lampshaded by Claudia in "The Thing Lay Still" when she first approaches Lestat about organizing a party on their final night in New Orleans. They will invite several humans to their house with the promise of eternal youth, and then massacre their guests before they depart for Buenos Aires.Claudia: They think we've got the fountain of youth in here. They don't know they're the fountain.
- One of the few permanent examples comes from Kamen Rider Den-O, which did this out of necessity. Hana's actress left unexpectedly in the middle of the seriesnote , but her character was too important to the story to write out. So the producers replaced the twentysomething actress with an eight-year-old. The official explanation was that this was a side effect of Den-O's efforts pushing the future closer to Hana's home timeline rather than the Bad Future the villains wanted to create.
- After the third movie, the show's star moved on to other projects, and thus this happened to protagonist Ryotaro as well. In this case, however, they simply brought back the actor who played the preteen version of him from the first film. It's given a Hand Wave when he remarks that this sort of thing happens on occasion when you mess around with time travel, which may also explain why there hasn't been a mad scramble for a cure for either him or Hana. Interestingly, Kid!Ryotaro's actor was a regular on Kamen Rider Ghost, showing that much like Case Closed, he could have returned to his normal age via The Slow Path at this point.
- In episode 16 of an old Sentai series called Kyodai Ken Byclosser, the villains use a weird gun to revert a couple of children (Yeah, children, strangely enough) to infancy, convinced that it will (somehow) make world domination easier. They also turn them into old people with another gun. A young woman is also regressed into a baby. Obviously, all of them are eventually turned back to normal.
- In the children's series LazyTown it occurs in the episode "Little Sportacus" where Sportacus is de-aged by Robbie Rotten's machine. This episode shows Sportacus being just as active and agile as his adult self and sends the message to kids that it's never too early and children no matter how young are capable of amazing things.
- The protagonists of The Legend of Dick and Dom stumble onto the Fountain of Youth (or fall into the Muddy Puddle Of Youth, anyway) and are regressed to childhood just in time to meet a bunch of witches who... really like children. Naturally, the witches end up falling in themselves by the end.
- Legend of the Seeker: Zedd is turned into a young man by Shota in "Wizard" so that he can do her bidding. Doesn't work out as intended, when it all goes to his head. Both Zedd and Shota can make anyone, including themselves, young, which means that they can live forever if they wished. Shota appears to make use of this power, as she's implied to be Zedd's age at least, while Zedd does not. She's shown to be very old when her magic is lost to her in "Reckoning".
- At the end of the Merlin (1998) series, when the titular character is a Cool Old Guy complete with beard, his last act of magic is to restore the youth of himself and his love, returning them to their younger personas seen years earlier in the story.
- The Mighty Boosh: In "Fountain of Youth", Howard and Vince visit Naboo's home planet, Xooberon, in search of their own Fountain of Youth, but the Hitcher is looking for it, too.
- Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:
- The Alien Rangers half-season was an extended plot arc in which all the regular characters were age-regressed to young children.
- This happened in a season 2 episode. In both cases, it seemed to be a strange mix of this and Time Travel- all the high-school-age heroes were now in elementary school, but they had the same teachers and principal. All the characters who were originally from out of town were still there as well.
- Once Upon a Time: August has turned back into a young Pinocchio, though he reverts back two seasons later.
- The Outer Limits (1995):
- In "Last Supper", an elderly scientist is tracking an immortal woman in the hopes that her blood will restore his youth. After all, he tried it on his (literal) guinea pig the last time he had her in custody and it's been alive for decades. In his desperation, however, he doesn't think his plan through and just scales up the dosage relative to body mass. He gets his youth, plus interest.
- In "The Balance of Nature", Dr. Noah Phillips developed a cellular regressor which can, in theory, rejuvenate cells and return the subject to their youth. When he uses the device on his wife Meredith who is in the last stages of terminal skin cancer, she is initially restored to perfect health with has no memory of the last 17 months. However, within less than a minute, the process reverses and kills her. Noah is fired and narrowly avoids a manslaughter charge. He resumed his work in secret about a year later. His attempt to regress a frog results in it reverting to a tadpole but it soon dies in the same fashion as Meredith. After his new neighbor Barbara Matheson refers to the balance of nature, he realizes that he must create a natural equilibrium; in order for one organism to regress in age, another must become older in tandem. He goes over to Barbara's house to tell her the good news but finds her barely alive on the floor, having been beaten severely by her husband Greg. As she is bleeding internally, he doubts that she will survive long enough for him to bring her to a hospital so he uses the cellular regressor on her. The 65-year-old Barbara regresses in age about 40 years so that she is once again a jazz singer in her early 20s named Barbara Spencer (with the stage name of Barbara Dumont). She is under the impression that it is 1957 and that she is engaged to Greg, a kind, sweet man. She does not initially believe Noah, who has aged in tandem when he tells her that it is 1998 and her youth has been restored but she is convinced when he shows her a photograph of her marriage to Greg. It turns out that Greg has been secretly observing them and wants Noah to restore his youth. However, he doesn't believe Noah when he says that the polarity reverses each time that the transfer is made and sits in the wrong chair. As a result, Greg ages to death while Noah is restored to his youth, having lost all memory of everything that has happened since Meredith's death. Barbara takes care of him and it is suggested that the two of them will live happily ever after.
- In Sanctuary, all of The Five had unnaturally long lifespans due to the infusion of pure vampire blood. Helen became a proper immortal, Tesla became a (quasi) vampire with the perks of immortality, and Watson had a technological device he created (as a result of his increased intelligence). Druitt meanwhile was forced to steal blood from other members of The Five to keep is youth. Griffin, the Invisible Man, managed to keep his youth up until WWII, only to die of old age between then and the present day. So whatever he had eventually stopped working.
- Second Chance (2016): A 75-year old man is given a "second chance" when he is de-aged to his 35-year old self. He's not the first person this has happened to either, just the most successful.
- An episode of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World had the gang meet a woman with water from the fountain of youth. Unfortunately, her supply runs out and she reverts to her true age and dies. Professor Challenger drinks a little of the water, and while it doesn't make him look younger, it heals his wounds and makes him temporarily strong, agile, and energetic like a teenager.
- On an episode of Smallville, an old man takes a spill into the koi pond at his retirement home, which turns out to be lined with Green Rocks that make him physically 50 years younger. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a sociopath with a long list of scores to settle, one of which is against the Kent family.
- Stargate:
- Stargate SG-1:
- In "Past and Present" the people of Vyan lost their memories, but it is later revealed that they've also regressed in age by several decades. The whole situation is actually the result of Linea experimenting with ways to make herself young again, but thanks to a freak lab accident it ended up de-aging the entire population of the planet instead of just her, and the amnesia was an unintended side-effect.
- This appears to be the case when 15-year-old O'Neill shows up in the episode "Fragile Balance." In actuality, he was an Asgard-designed clone that did not mature properly. The real O'Neill was held captive by the rogue Asgard the entire time.
- A mild example happens in Stargate Atlantis when Sheppard's tenuous Wraith ally returned the years he had, um, borrowed, plus a bit. Possibly an attempt to balance out the six months he spent in a time dilation field.
- Stargate SG-1:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- The episode "Too Short a Season" has an old Admiral who must negotiate a hostage situation. He seems to have taken a drink from this Fountain as he keeps getting younger. We find out he takes an alien drug that does this too well — the strain on his body kills him.
- The episode "Rascals", in which a transporter malfunction turns Picard, Keiko, Ro and Guinan into children, during which time the Enterprise is captured by hostile aliens. Despite the fact that they clearly keep their adult minds, they still have to save the day using childlike cleverness rather than their usual methods. As children, they would lack the strength and speed to do many of the physical actions an adult could perform.
- In the Supernatural episode "About a Boy", Hansel goes around kidnapping people and rejuvenating them to young teens for Katja the witch to feed on, as actual children are too protected by the law for her to kidnap them without being found. Dean and a woman named Tina end up falling victim to this, but while Dean managed to turn himself back before finishing the witch off, Tina didn't. However, that didn't bother her; Dean offered to try to find another way to return her to normal, but she opted to stay as a kid and get a second, better chance at life.
- Tidelands (Netflix): Contact with seawater causes Genoveva to turn back into her youthful self.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- In "Kick the Can", Charles Whitley convinces the other Sunnyvale Rest Home residents, with the exception of his lifelong friend Ben Conroy, that playing kick-the-can in the street is the key to recapturing their lost youth. When he and the superintendent Mr. Cox investigate, Ben finds that Charles and the others have regressed to young children. After this transformation, the young Charles fails to recognize Ben.
- In "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain", Harmon Gordon is desperate to keep up with his wife Flora, 40 years his junior, and asks his brother Raymond to test an experimental cellular serum on him in the hope that he will become young again. Although it has been successfully tested on animal subjects and human glands and organs, Raymond says that it will be 20 years before it is ready for human testing. However, he reluctantly agrees to inject Harmon with the serum after his brother threatens to commit suicide. The next morning, Harmon has the appearance of a man of about 40 and regresses to 30 in front of Flora and Raymond. It soon becomes clear that the effects of the serum are out of control. Within hours, Harmon has become a toddler.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Aqua Vita", Christie Copperfield learns of the bottled water company Aqua Vita from her friend and co-worker Shauna Allen. By drinking it on a daily basis, a person can look years younger than their actual age. At first, Christie feels wonderful as she has gotten her confidence back and the ratings for her news show are up. However, she soon discovers that missing even one daily glass of Aqua Vita causes her to age rapidly and the only way to reverse it is to drink some more. This becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on because each bottle costs $5,000. After the Aqua Vita runs out, Christie looks as if she is in her 70s. Shauna, who is seven years older and has been taking Aqua Vita for longer, appears to be over 80 when her own supply runs out.
- VR Troopers: In "Small But Mighty", Grimlord uses a new device to turn the Troopers back into 10 year olds so that they'll be powerless and thus leave him free to invade our reality.
- In the Failed Pilot Episode of W.E.I.R.D. World (1995), one sideplot features Dr Abby O'Reardon developing a youth serum, the only drawback being that it requires an antidote to stop. After a series of humiliations at the hands of her research partner Dr Mayhew, Abby decides to test it on him, the serum kicking in while he's out of the lab. Finding himself restored to his twenties, he's initially overjoyed... only to find himself hurtling backwards through his teenage years soon after. Before long, he's so young that he can no longer drive safely and is caught wandering the streets by the cops, who have him escorted back to the lab - by which time he's a child and getting steadily younger between cuts, much to Abby's amusement. We don't see how young he actually gets before the antidote takes effect, but in the finale, Dr Monochian announces that Abby has adopted a baby, indicating that she deliberately took her time.
