cult film freak: KAREN GREEN FROM 'ZEBRA IN THE KITCHEN' TO 'WAGON TRAIN'

Karen Green from ZEBRA IN THE KITCHEN Year: 1965 Rating: ***

Part zoo renovation propaganda, part children's film, ZEBRA IN THE KITCHEN has a memorable yet misleading title: as that otherwise innocuous striped horse is only shown once, digging around a random suburban kitchen...

The most important wild animal belonging to DENNIS THE MENACE child actor Jay North: a mountain lion named Sunshine raised by his family in the woods... until their move to the city...

Jay North and Karen Green from ZEBRA IN THE KITCHEN

Where the poor kid has to put it into otherwise optimistic Andy Devine's dodgy, cramped-cage zoo, reluctantly run by idealistic Martin Milner, who (along with pretty assistant Joyce Meadows) inevitably ventures into town to retrieve the animals that North set free...

As the second half is both hit and miss: involving the most involving scenes with various wild animals turning up inside and outside of domestic homes or the city's main street... from monkeys ravaging a pet shop to a park-roaming ostrich to an elephant drinking from a bathing man's bathtub...

Karen Green, Dorothy Green, Jim Davis and Andy Devine from ZEBRA IN THE KITCHEN

These humorously reactive moments are also where the timing's somewhat off, feeling like a meandering TV-pilot instead of an MGM motion picture (by CLARENCE THE CROSS-EYED LION director Ivan Tors)...

Also eaturing child-turned-teen starlet Karen Green as Jay North's pretty, full-lipped, sandy-blonde, freckled cousin.. who would often play troubled and intense young ladies on the small or big screen: from having a Wally Cleaver crush on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER to being Efrem Zimbalist Jr's brooding military daughter in THE CROWDED SKY...

Andy Devine and Karen Green on WAGON TRAIN: The Jess MacAbee Story

Yet she's best remembered for three WAGON TRAIN episodes: ironically in the first she's ZEBRA co-star Andy Devine's 14-year-old tomboy daughter, secretly crushing on handsome cowboy Peter Horton...

By season 7, she's a young version of juvenile crook Lorraine Day, thrown into a nightmarish prison cell... and eventually giving birth to Tom Skerrit's baby on that season's finale: ironically ending her decade-long career in labor for FAMILY AFFAIR: as this is both a ZEBRA IN THE KITCHEN review and a pictorial study of this underrated/unknown starlet's eclectic roles.