Fountain of Youth - Literature and Popular Culture

Literature and Popular Culture

The Fountain of Youth lives on as a metaphor for anything that potentially increases longevity. It is a frequently used plot device in age regression stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne used the Fountain in "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" to demonstrate that positive thinking is a far better remedy than deluded journeys to Florida for legendary cures; Orson Welles directed and starred in a 1958 TV program based on the legend; and Tim Powers featured it in On Stranger Tides, a novel of 18th century pirate-voodoo adventure.

In 1953, the Walt Disney Company created a cartoon entitled Don's Fountain of Youth, in which Donald Duck had supposedly discovered the famous fountain and can't resist pretending to his nephews that it really works. Seven years later, in "That's no fable!" Carl Barks revisited the myth this time with Scrooge McDuck and his nephews finding the real fountain. "Sweet Duck of Youth", an episode of the later animated series Duck Tales, also features this plotline, revealing that the fountain's true power is actually to make one's reflection appear younger (thus the 'youth' is merely an illusion).

In 1974, Marvel Comics featured the Fountain (which works if bathed in, but cripples if drunk from) in Man-Thing and later The Savage She-Hulk. In the 1976 comedy series Big John, Little John, a middle-aged man drank from the Fountain of Youth and then switch back and forth from 12-years-old to 43-years-old throughout the series. In the 1994 computer game Sid Meier's Colonization, finding a Fountain of Youth in a Lost City rumor would bring several people to the docks in Europe; this could be found several times during one game. In 2005 the Fountain turned up in the DC Comics series Day of Vengeance. The fountain and its waters form the main plot device in Microsoft and Ensemble Studio's Age of Empires III campaign "Blood, Ice and Steel". Recently, characters in the 2006 Darren Aronofsky film The Fountain search for the Tree of Life to cure a brain tumor. Jorge Luis Borges refers to the Fountain of Life in a short story in the book The Aleph, in which the people who are immortal get tired of it and eventually start looking for the Fountain of Death to reverse their immortality.

In Terry Pratchett's Eric, Ponce da Quirm finds and drinks from the Fountain of Youth but dies, wishing they had put up a sign saying "boil first".

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, is based on a journey in search of the Fountain of Youth. This was alluded to at the end of the previous film where Captain Jack Sparrow had taken the map from Captain Hector Barbossa. The Fountain from On Stranger Tides requires two people to drink from silver chalices found on the ship of Ponce de Leon; whoever drinks from the chalice filled with a mermaid's tears will take the remaining and lived years of the other drinker's life and add it to their own, while the other person instantly dies.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt tells of a family that was given eternal youth after drinking from a spring. It deals more with the negative effects eternal youth can have.