I happened to come upon the last five minutes of The Donna Reed Show, and the set looked very familiar. In the background there was a pair of louvred doors. Screen-left were stairs, and screen-right was the front door. It’s probably been a couple of decades since I last saw an episode of I Dream Of Jeannie, but it sure looked like Major Nelson’s front room.
Both of these shows were produced by Screen Gems. The Donna Reed Show ran through 1966, and I Dream Of Jeannie began in 1967. It seems reasonable that Screen Gems re-used the set. How common was this? I’m not talking about props from one show or film showing up in another show or film. I’m asking about shows that ran concurrently, and the production company simply moved a new family in when the old family’s show ended.
Reusing sets in Hollywood is (or was) pretty common in the heyday of movies. The major studios had a “main street” that could be tailored for each movie – a New York main street, a small town main street, etc. Walk around the corner from the NY street and you were in Springfield or a street in Africa with grass huts.
Some of the “outdoor” sets were actually indoors. (Many of MASH’s tents and road scenes were of this type.) A western street was also common – just change the name of the bar, hotel and sheriff.
I know of studio holdings of several city blocks in Burbank (CA) that were torn down, and the Century City shopping complex was built on a former 20th Century Fox lot when the studios were deactivating these kinds of properties. Sometimes they would break down structures into flats which allowed them to store those more compactly. If you were a producer on a budget, you might roam through warehouses for stuff that you could use or cheaply modify.
My reply might not answer your question directly, but it’s the closest I can come.
Major Nelson and Jeannie’s kitchen was the same one as Larry Tate’s (Darrin’s boss on Bewitched). Both were Screen Gems productions. The Bewitched living room was also the living room in a Jerry Lewis movie, Hook Line and Sinker.
FYI, the son of the actor who played Larry Tate was killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland a couple of years before he died.
I got the meaning, but this is a very awkward sentence.