On this date in 1965, I Dream Of Jeannie, TV Comedy starring Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman, debuted on NBC. 10 facts about the show.
For those not familiar with it, I Dream of Jeannie is an American fantasy sitcom television series created by Sidney Sheldon. The show starred Barbara Eden as a 2,000-year-old genie from the fictional nation of Basenji, and Larry Hagman as astronaut Captain Tony Nelson.
The pilot episode was called The Lady in the Bottle. In it, Tony Nelson’s capsule, Stardust, lands on a deserted island miles from the planned recovery location. He finds a strange bottle that rolls around by itself. He opens it, rubs it, and out comes a beautiful female genie who only speaks Persian, and has been trapped in the bottle for two thousand years. Tony’s first wish is that she gains the ability to speak English. His second is for the recovery Helicopter to show up and find them. Jeannie is already in love with Tony and so she rolls her bottle into his bag to make sure he takes her home.
Jeannie’s bottle was a Jim Beam Whiskey decanter, which was painted and decorated with gold leaf. The inside of it was a set on a sound stage, which Barbara Eden had to climb an eight foot Ladder to get into.
Jeannie’s efforts to help Tony and make him fall in love with her raise the suspicions of Tony's commanding officer, Colonel Dr. Alfred Bellows, who is also a psychiatrist. He is often the only other person to witness Jeannie's magic and Tony’s efforts to cover it up, and is convinced that Tony is going mad or has a secret.
Jeannie has an evil Twin, Jeannie II, who appears in series 3. She dresses in Green rather than Pink and has dark hair. She was played by Barbara Eden in a brunette Wig.
The theme music was a song called Jeannie, composed by Hugo Montenegro with lyrics by Buddy Kaye. At least, it was from series 2. The theme for series 1 was an instrumental jazz waltz written by Richard Wess. For some reason, a theme song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King before the show ever aired, was never used.
Larry Hagman was drinking heavily at the time the show was being made and was frequently drunk on set. The producers almost fired him because they found him so difficult to work with, and had Darren McGavin lined up to replace him, and a storyline written to explain the change. However, the studio executives vetoed that. Barbara Eden, however, got on with Hagman really well and said in interviews later that she had a connection with him she’d never found with any other actor. The pair were also friends off screen and remained so until Hagman died in 2012.
This was the 1960s and so there were some strict rules to follow. Jeannie’s belly button could never be shown and extra layers had to be added to her costume’s bottom half so her legs didn’t show through it.
There were also strict rules to ensure that if Tony and Jeannie were ever alone in his bedroom, at least one of them had to be shown leaving the room so nobody could even imagine they got up to anything in there when the camera stopped rolling. It was even forbidden for her bottle to be left in Tony’s bedroom.
The decision to have Tony and Jeannie get married in season 5 was made by the network in a bid to improve ratings. Barbara Eden disagreed with this plot development. A genie isn’t human, she argued, so a marriage was probably not even possible (although in season 1 there is a reveal that Jeannie was human once, a girl from a peasant family, and had been turned into a genie by "The Blue Djinn.") Also, it removed the “Will they, won’t they?” tension between the characters and if Jeannie became a housewife it simply wouldn’t be as funny. Another of Eden’s arguments was that it made the show too similar to the rival show of the time, Bewitched.
.jpg)
