I Dream of Jeannie 04x10: How to Marry an Astronaut

I got an email request to do a recap of this specific episode of  I Dream of Jeannie, and of course I was stoked! If there’s ever an episode of something you’d like me to recap, then feel free to email me at jvonhalsing@gmail.com. I might not have access to what you want, but I’ll certainly try!

The last time we checked in on Jeannie, she was squaring off against her sinister lookalike sister, Jeannie II. Major Nelson was oblivious to subtle details, Roger was being blinked to every corner of the earth, and Dr. Bellows was convinced that he was hallucinating James Bond outfits on the people at work. Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff for Cocoa Beach.

We’re now into season four, and there’ve been a few changes worth mentioning: Jeannie II has appeared a couple of times since her last visit, so some of the grudges you might expect to resurface are water under the bridge; Dr. Bellows’ wife, Amanda, is now a regular feature on the show; and Roger’s character has been turned into a cartoonish playboy instead of a realistically girl-crazy astronaut. It’s all the usual characterization fatigue you see on sitcoms. The really bizarre changes start in season five.

And, even though a genie and an astronaut almost get married in this episode, this isn’t the one where Major Nelson and Jeannie tie the knot. The title, “How to Marry an Astronaut”, is a take-off on How to Marry a Millionaire, the classic Lauren Bacall film that was turned into a TV series in 1957, with none other than Barbara Eden in the role originated by Betty Grable.

One day, I’ll subject you to an episode of that, but right now we’re sticking with Jeannie. Or Jeannies, as the case may be.

The pink and gold bottle that Jeannie calls home is resting in its usual place on the desk, and we see that inside, Jeannie is rocking out to some ragtime on her Victrola while she reads Brides Magazine. Her Victrola is very cute, painted with pink and red flowers that match her outfit, but it’s also a weird choice. She lives in the 1960’s and was trapped in a bottle for a hundred and fifty years, so where’d she get it and why doesn’t she want a record player instead?

These urgent questions are swept aside, when the living room fills with a distorted version of Jeannie’s blink sound, and Jeannie II appears. She calls a few times for her sister, pacing the room with a hip-swishing sashay that sets her harem pants rippling like water. Barbara Eden changes the whole vibe of that costume just by altering her body language. It’s really impressive.

Jeannie II notices the open bottle, the stopper sitting right next to it, and raises an eyebrow at the universe.

“Oh…” she smirks, “That’d almost be too easy.”

Still, you can’t take the spots off a leopard. Jeannie II pops the stopper in, and as her trapped sister realizes what’s going on and starts to stomp her feet and call for help, she advises getting some kind of alarm system. After all, she notes, Jeannie gets stuck in there an awful lot.

I Dream of Jeannie 03x02: Jeannie or the Tiger

Why not follow up last month’s double bill of doppelgängers and this month’s Bewitched entry with the episode of I Dream of Jeannie that introduces her lookalike sister? Sounds fun, right?

Yes it does, don’t be difficult.

I Dream of Jeannie is a 1966 sitcom about an astronaut (very chic at the time) finding a genie in a bottle on a remote island in the Pacific. He’s a handsome astronaut played by Larry Hagman, and she’s a warm-blooded young genie played by Barbara Eden, so she’s constantly making moves on him that – for some baffling reason – he turns down. We establish pretty quickly that he’s straight, btw, so that torpedoes the usual theory.

Jeannie uses her powers to try and improve her beloved Major Nelson’s life, but it never goes well. Nine times out of ten, it’s Major Nelson’s fault because he never adequately explains why she shouldn’t just use her cosmic powers to fix things.

(What is your actual deal, Major Nelson? How can you be trying to go to the moon while ignoring the possibilities this type of magic can bring to mankind?)

Rounding out the cast was Bill Daily as Major Nelson’s best bud, the reasonably greedy and excitable Roger Healy. Roger is also an astronaut, and the only person who seems to grasp that Jeannie is a magical super-being. He’s a pretty good guy, but he tends to use Jeannie’s powers for personal financial gain like anybody would, let’s be real. Everyone is a Roger.

Their chief nemesis was Hayden Rorke as NASA psychiatrist Dr. Bellows, an uptight and rigid professional who has no time for everyone bending the laws of physics when there’s a moon to land on. He usually thinks the boys are going insane, or that some kind of Russian sabotage is in play, but he never does anything about it except shout and look confused.

Harper Valley P.T.A. 01x03: Mail and Female

Harper Valley PTA started out as a 1968 radio hit for Jeannie C. Riley, about a widowed single mother who isn’t bothering to conform to small town standards because she wears miniskirts and laughs at jokes. According to the local PTA, this makes her a floozy and her degenerate ways must be stopped, so they send her a cease and desist order in the mail. She goes to their next meeting, airs the town’s dirty laundry and, metaphorically, flips everyone off before she goes back to living her life as she damn well pleases. Great song, very catchy.

In 1978, it was made into a drive-in movie starring Barbara Eden. If it had starred literally anyone else, it probably would have been lost to the sands of time. But the same piece of casting that saves it from obscurity dooms it to not making any sense. Barbara Eden, even in the most mini of skirts, doesn’t seem as a scandalous figure, or the kind of woman that other women would be venomously jealous of. Like, if she ever played a serial killer, the general response would be: “Aw, leave her alone, FBI! She’s fun!”

And when you’re turning a three minute song into an eighty minute movie, you have to pad the story. So there’s car chases and kidnappers are hired, and then people have to get disguised as nuns, and there’s a subplot about a real estate mogul who threatens to foreclose on women’s houses if they don’t make out with him, and it’s a lot. Which means when, in 1981, they decided to turn the film into a television show, they had to take a lot of stuff back out, and the end result is that the general premise gets a little lost in the shuffle.