I Dream of Jeannie - Multi-part Story Arcs

Multi-part Story Arcs

On several occasions, multi-part story arcs were created to serve as backgrounds for national contests. During the second season, in a story that is the focus of a two-part episode and a peripheral plot of two further episodes, it was established that Jeannie did not know her birthday and her family members could not agree when it was either (2,000 years being a long time to remember such a thing). Tony and Roger use NASA's powerful new computer and horoscopic guidance based on Jeannie's traits to calculate it. The year is quickly established as 64 B.C., but only Roger is privy to the exact date and he decides to make a game out of revealing it. This date became the basis of the contest. Jeannie finally forces it out of him at the end of the fourth episode: April 1.

In a third-season four-part episode ("Genie, Genie, Who's Got the Genie?" ), Jeannie is locked in a safe bound for the moon. Any attempt to force the safe or use the wrong combination will destroy it with an explosive. Jeannie is in there so long, that whoever opens the safe will become her master. The episodes spread out over four weeks, during which a contest was held to guess the safe's combination. This explains why Larry Hagman is never seen saying the combination out loud: His mouth is hidden behind the safe or the shot is on Jeannie when he says it. The combination was not decided until just before the episode aired, with Hagman's voice dubbed in. Over the closing credits, Barbara Eden announced and congratulated the contest winner. The combination: 4–9–7.

In the fourth season, a two-part episode, "The Case Of My Vanishing Master", concerned Tony being taken to a secret location somewhere in the world, while a perfect double took his place at home (and was flabbergasted by the magical Jeannie he encountered there!). A contest was held to guess the location to which Tony had been taken. Unlike earlier contests, the answer was not revealed within the story. At the end of "Invisible House For Sale", there was a special "contest epilogue" (never repeated in syndication) where Jeannie and Tony revealed to the audience the "secret location," Puerto Rico, followed by the name of the "Grand Prize Winner."