The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has collected Barbara Eden’s genie bottle and costume worn and used in her 1960s television sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie.” The bottle will be featured in the museum’s new acquisitions showcase outside of the Entertainment Nation exhibition highlighting recently donated objects to the arts and culture collections that define moments in American entertainment history.
Eden portrayed Jeannie, a 2000-year-old magical genie, on the popular series “I Dream of Jeannie” that premiered September 18, 1965, and ran for five seasons on NBC until 1970. The series was created by Sidney Sheldon and produced by Screen Gems and his studio Sidney Sheldon Productions, chronicling the life of Larry Hagman’s character, astronaut Tony Nelson, who discovers an ancient genie trapped in a bottle after crash landing in the South Pacific. When Nelson frees Eden’s character Jeannie from the bottle, she is bound to serve him and grant him wishes. Subsequently, Jeannie falls in love with Nelson, then moving to live with him in his Florida home.
The sitcom was successful during its run but has been remarkably popular and long-lived in American culture in the decades since. The bottle on display was one of several used in production of the series, gifted to Eden on the last day of shooting. Each bottle, in fact, was a 1964 Jim Beam Christmas edition whiskey decanter painted by the prop department that the show’s first director, Gene Nelson, saw as just the right bottle to serve as Jeannie’s home.
In its prime, the series found humor in the unusual domestic arrangement of man and love-struck servant, verging on transgressive satire on gender roles, married life, and hetero-normative sexuality in a postwar, suburban America. Also, the series drew on casual and unserious orientalism, notable in the context of the Western media’s relationships with and representations of the Middle East, in its costumes, narrative and character inspiration. The series is said to have exoticized, demonized and infantilized the seemingly irredeemable “others,” reinforcing the colonialist geopolitical power structure. As well, the show leaned into the inept housewife-type humor popularized in the mid twentieth century, epitomizing the “ditz” or “dumb blonde” stereotype in American entertainment. However, female viewers enjoyed the unlimited power Jeannie wielded, especially over men, and the power she held in her relationship with Nelson. The costume ensemble illustrates how postwar television sitcoms represented American life, gender roles and labor. The objects will allow visitors to participate in national conversations and curators to draft narratives on the difficult or complex historical trends of popular entertainment.
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Laura Duff
(202) 633-3129
duffl@si.edu