Also common to myriad mid-'60s comedies, I Dream of Jeannie is rooted in fantasy. In the pilot episode, "The Lady in the Bottle," astronaut Captain Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) finds himself temporarily stranded on a remote Pacific Island after his experimental spacecraft goes awry, and there he finds a mysterious bottle containing a beautiful djinni, Jeannie (Barbara Eden). Freed after many centuries, Jeannie vows allegiance to a new master who's more than a little reluctant to take her back home to Cocoa Beach, Florida. Bubbly, energetic, and mischievous Jeannie will not be denied, however, and episodes revolve around Tony's efforts to hide Jeannie and her unlimited magical powers from friend and fellow astronaut Captain Roger Healey (Bill Daily) and especially psychiatrist Col. Bellows (Hayden Rorke). (Creator Sidney Sheldon was clever to make Tony and Roger astronauts; NASA's space program was in full swing during the show's run, and already on everyone's mind in a big way.)

Like shows from this era, early episodes are fairly clever, inventive and energetic, but overall the series quickly grows stale because it gradually devolves into variations of the same situations week-after-week. Tony can't contain Jeannie's desire to please him with her magic - Tony struggles mightily to keep her under wraps, in so doing creating the impression that he's out of his mind. This, of course, was also the set-up for Bewitched, which had been a big hit the previous season on rival network ABC. (I Dream of Jeannie was an NBC show.)

To its credit, I Dream of Jeannie, at least in its first season, varies this premise more than most, partly because it doesn't seem too sure where it wants to take its characters. Quite a few first season shows take Tony and Jeannie away from the suburban and military trappings with early episodes set, for instance, in Baghdad and the Nevada desert. (There's good use of location shooting and the studio backlot in these shows.)

The pilot episode is far more sexually-charged than what would follow. As actor Bill Daily notes repeatedly (with good reason) in the episode's commentary track, Barbara Eden is especially sexy here, and it's quite unfortunate that the network censors (presumably) threw cold water over this palpable sexual tension between Jeannie and Tony.

Instead, the series wound up being driven by fantasy slapstick and sight gags that lean heavily on the show's plentiful special effects. Most of these are pretty basic: props levitated by wires and which appear/disappear via simple jump cuts, but often the visual gags are impressively elaborate.

Early episodes don't seem to know what to do with Bill Daily's Roger, who starts out as a kind of bland straight man playing second fiddle to Hayden Rorke's delightfully underplayed character, but then he briefly becomes something of a lascivious ladies man before settling into a lovable confidant to Tony after learning about Jeannie half-way through this first season, and anticipating a great comic persona that would fully blossom on The Bob Newhart Show.

Daily and Rorke are both a lot of fun to watch, but the core to the show's appeal unquestionably is the chemistry between Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden. Hagman's nervous energy, good looks, and impressive timing is matched by Eden's incredible charm in a defining role that (understandably) she would forever be identified with.

Karen Sharpe (Kramer) played Tony's girlfriend in a few early shows and Barton MacLane became a regular on the series until his death in 1969. Fans of such things will note the first season's line-up of great character players: Richard Kiel (in a surprisingly, ahem, large part), Mako, Dabney Coleman, Nancy Kovak, Woodrow Parfrey, J. Carrol Naish, Billy Mumy, Arlene Martel, Jamie Farr, Judy Carne, Bernard Fox, Maureen McCormick, James Hong, Ted de Corsia, Booth Coleman, Gila Golan, and Vic Tayback, among many others. Legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager appears briefly in one episode.

Video & Audio

I Dream of Jeannie is presented in its original full frame format in excellent black and white transfers, 30 shows spread over four single-sided discs that are complete and not time-compressed. The image is sharp with little signs of wear, the blacks are excellent throughout, and only in process shots is there any obvious loss in picture quality. Sheldon wanted to shoot the series in color from the get-go, so I suppose one could make the case for Sony's colorized boxed set, also available, though this reviewer prefers and recommends the original black and white versions.

Also missing during its first year is the familiar theme music. The opening theme heard here is pleasant if unmemorable. Some early shows feature a prologue narrated by Paul Frees that recaps the first episode. Those wanting to hear Jeannie's theme should fear not: it's repeated ad nauseum over the menu screens.

The English mono audio is clean and clear, but there are no alternate audio or subtitles options.

Extra Features

Supplements include a pleasant featurette, Out of the Bottle: I Dream of Jeannie, a 14-minute full-frame show featuring new interviews with writer-producer Sidney Sheldon (is that an I.V. he's hooked up to?), Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, and Bill Daily.

The actors also turn up on an Audio Commentary Track for the pilot episode, and their reactions to the episode 40 years later are delightful.

Parting Thoughts

I Dream of Jeannie is only fair: its scripts are routine sixties sitcom fare, though the cast goes a long way to sell the comedy and the production polish common to the era holds up well all these years later.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.