I Dream of Jeannie - Jeannie's Origin

Jeannie's Origin

In the first season, it is made clear that Jeannie was originally a human who was turned into a genie by (as later revealed) the Blue Djinn when she refused to marry him. Several members of her family, including her parents, are rather eccentric, but none are genies. Her mother describes the family as "just peasants from the old country". (Note that the term "Djinn" is synonymous with "genie".)

The topic of Jeannie originally being human is restated in season two during the episode, "How to be a Genie in 10 Easy Lessons". Jeannie mentions that she has a sister who is a genie, but the phrasing – "she was a genie when I left Baghdad" – does bring up the question of whether she too was born a genie.

In the third season, this continuity was changed retroactively and it was assumed that Jeannie has always been a genie. All her relatives are then also genies, including, by the fourth season, her mother (also played by Barbara Eden). This may have been done to increase the similarity with Bewitched, or simply to increase the number of possible plotlines. Whatever the reason, this new concept was retained for the rest of the series.

The 1985 TV movie I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later reiterates most of Jeannie's first-season origin when she tells her son, Tony Jr., that she was trapped in her bottle by an evil djinn after she refused to marry him. (There is no specific statement, however, about whether he turned her into a genie at that time or if she had been born one.)

In a 1966 paperback novel published by Pocket Books, very loosely based on the series, it was established in the story that Jeannie (in the book, her real name is revealed as "Fawzia") and her immediate family were genies living in Tehran hundreds of years before Tony found her bottle on an island in the Persian Gulf (instead of the South Pacific, as depicted on TV).