Willie is a boy who doesn't seem to fit in with his peers. He never seems to grow and so they torment him. One day he is chased home by he usual bullies and the next day announces to what seem to be his parents that it is time for him to leave. Well, the thing is that for fifty odd years he has never aged. He is forever a boy, looking the same, sounding the same. In flashback, we see the first person who loved him and took care of him. She is an older lady whose husband has just died. She takes him in. When she dies, he is on his own and this begins the process of finding people he can make happy. This is a subtle, quiet portrayal of life for a person who lives to do good with little reward. Nice, sentimental episode.
2 Reviews
"Wouldn't it be nice if children could stay young forever."
classicsoncall1 February 2022
Warning: Spoilers
This was a sad story in a way, even though perpetually youthful Willie (Josh Saviano) found a way to navigate his life from one family to another over a long period of time. Because he stopped aging at twelve, Willie wound up in a state orphanage when his real parents passed away, and eventually hit upon a novel scheme in which he perused local newspapers for obituaries of boys his own age, and ingratiated himself with the families of those boys by pretending he was lost and in need of help. The opening scene demonstrated how he pulled it off, and ensuing segments showed how he managed to maintain his relationship with different families for roughly three year periods of time before moving on. Young Josh Saviano was well cast for the role, and was actually a good looking kid, though if you happened to catch the TV series "The Wonder Years" airing a couple years after this episode, you would have gotten the impression he was as geeky as the character he portrayed on that show.
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