I’ve been I Dream of Jeannie on WGN. Besides noticing that the Bellowses have met Jeannie at least twice before she was introduced as Major Nelson’s fiance (they also met her as Tony’s insane secret wife that he was divorcing and as his cleaning lady, both times under the name “Jeannie”) I noticed that they never seemed to address whether anybody at NASA noticed that Tony & Jeannie were “living together” before they got married.
Yes, obviously we the audience kew that they were “living together” since the pilot, but Jeannie had her own little bottle and it was all perfectly innocent, but after they they got engaged and Jeannie went public as his (human) fiance did they bother trying to explain were she lived? I don’t think an USAF officer openly living with his girlfriend was exactly kosher in the late '60s, but from what I can tell neither Dr or Mrs Bellowses ever really questioned it. I haven’t seen the wedding episode for awhile, but didn’t Amanda make a big deal out of keeping the couple seperate for a day before the wedding?
In real life in the 60s it was something of a scandal for a woman to live with a man before they were married. In polite society. Of course it happened.
On television it was entirely unprecedented. Simply never allowed on a television show before Jeannie. They got around this by Jeannie living in a bottle, not the house. Yeah, right. Barbara Eden also was not allowed to show her naval, so they had a divot to fill it in.
In NASA there might have been bachelor astronauts like Tony and Roger, but they sure didn’t get a lot of high profile assignments. Astronauts in the public eye were carefully screened for family man status.
Such a progressive show. Everybody knew that Major Nelson was gay, hence the lack of raised eyebrows when people notice he has a women living with him. As a young teen I found the show disturbing until I finally figured this out. I mean, he has a gorgeous women at home who throws herself at him at every opportunity and he always refuses and that seemed perfectly logical to all the other characters… either I was very mixed up or he wasn’t interested in women and everybody knew it.
It’s been decades since I watched that show - did he live in military housing, or did he own the house? I can’t speak from experience, having not been in the military myself, but I could see the military providing small one-bedroom houses for bachelors. And I have seen a handful of very small one-bedroom houses around my town. I think they were originally built as housing for migrant workers.
Not exactly. That type of house is called a one-and-a-half story house. It has what is essentially a finished attic. And as a matter of fact, it is typical of small one-and-a-half story houses to have one bedroom down, and one or more upstairs. Major Nelson appeared to use his upstairs as an office/study, and he had a telescope set up looking out one of the windows. It’s possible there was room upstairs for a guest room, but this is unclear.
As I recall it, the upstairs study was to the left of the stairs, leaving the 2nd floor area to the right of the stairs, above Tony’s bedroom, unknown. I say it was a second bedroom. And I have vague memories of Major Healy once staying overnight at Tony’s.
Of course they never thought of that. Tony was an upstanding man – a soldier who was serving his country and had flown into space. And that Jeannie was a very nice girl. It was ridiculous to insult them by considering such a question.
Wrong. Jack Swigert never married. He was accepted as an astronaut in 1966. As far as high-profile assignments, he got to fly to the Moon in Apollo 13. Kevin Bacon played him in the movie.
Then there’s the far more obvious (in hindsight) issue that they cast a pale blonde to play a humanoid supernatural being from Middle Eastern mythology.
Of course, in Middle Eastern mythology, genies never look like beautiful women, except when they take that on as a false form to mislead and destroy human victims.
