The Fountain of Youth is a 1956 television pilot directed by Orson Welles for a proposed Desilu Productions anthology series that was never produced.

Joi Lansing and Rick Jason star as a narcissistic couple faced with an irresistible temptation concocted by a scientist (Dan Tobin).

"It was intended to inaugurate a series of short stories Welles would narrate and direct in the First Person Singular style of his Mercury Theatre on the Air and Campbell Playhouse radio series, but with his innovative radio techniques adapted for the visual intimacy of the newer medium," wrote Welles biographer Joseph McBride.

The vaudeville-show tone and blackout style, suited to the 1920s setting, lend unsettling dark humor to this fable about human vanity … As the faintly sinister host, Welles is so ubiquitous a presence, sometimes even mouthing the characters words, that he becomes their puppet master, darkly amused by their self-destructive foibles.

"[1]: 124 Desi Arnaz conceived the series and proposed that Welles host and narrate every episode — combining his gift for storytelling with the intimacy of television.

"When I made my deal with Orson for the pilot, I was trying to develop an anthology series which would include The Fountain of Youth," Arnaz wrote, "and the kind of stories Edgar Allan Poe is famous for, like 'The Pit and the Pendulum'.

"[3]: 518 Most published reports that the pilot was costly and over schedule were refuted by Welles scholar Bill Krohn, who studied the Desilu files.

"[11] "The best measure of how far ahead of its time this experimental but unpretentious program was in 1958 is that it still seems avant-garde compared with anything yet seen on American commercial television," wrote biographer Joseph McBride in 2006.