‘I Dream of Jeannie’ Returned After 15 Years — With Wayne Rogers, Not Larry Hagman
I Dream of Jeannie fans likely dreamed of seeing Jeannie and her “master” again after the original series ended its run on NBC in 1970. And sure enough, Barbara Eden’s eponymous genie and Tony Nelson, her astronaut love interest, did return to TV in the NBC movie I Dream of Jeannie… Fifteen Years Later, which aired 40 years ago, on October 20, 1985. But it wasn’t the same Dream that lit up TV sets for five seasons — costar Larry Hagman was gone, and filling the role of Tony was Wayne Rogers, best known as M*A*S*H’s Trapper John.
Wayne Rogers replaced Larry Hagman in I Dream of Jeannie… Fifteen Years Later
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t get Larry, because by then he was doing Dallas, and he was working very hard and didn’t want to do a movie plus his Dallas schedule,” Eden later told the Television Academy Foundation, per Closer Weekly.
“We were lucky to have Wayne Rogers as the master. The film was very good, but not the same, because he’s different. I mean, we’re all so unique and individual, so it was different. And Wayne brought a different texture and had a little more of an edge than Larry. For me, it was intimidating, because it had been so long and I was older. But overall it was well received.”
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Barbara Eden thought the movie’s plot was “a bit strange”
Donning her Jeannie costume again was a “very strange” experience, as Eden recounted in her 2012 memoir, Jeannie Out of the Bottle. “The moment I put it on, I got goose bumps all over my body,” she wrote. “I looked in the mirror and felt as though time hadn’t passed at all.”
The Fifteen Years Later plot was “a bit strange, but probably appropriate for its time,” the TV star continued. “When the story opens, Jeannie has at last realized her own value. She’s married to Major Nelson, has a child with him (played by Mackenzie Astin, the twelve-year-old son of Patty Duke and John Astin), and has become more assertive than she was at the start of the series.”
After realizing that Tony takes her for granted, Jeannie “moves out of their house, rents an apartment on her own, and attempts to live the life of a 1980s liberated woman,” Eden explained. “Not the world’s most scintillating script, but a worthwhile and fun exercise in nostalgia.”
(The production did give Jeannie to play evil sister Jeannie II again, too. “I always loved playing the sister because, as they say, the devil always gets the best lines,” she wrote.)
Fifteen Year Later also reunited Eden with former I Dream of Jeannie costars Bill Daily, who played Tony’s friend Roger Healy, and Hayden Rorke, who played NASA medical officer Dr. Alfred Bellows. In fact, the TV movie was Rorke’s final screen credit before his 1987 death.
Fans of the original were unimpressed
In a Reddit thread about Fifteen Years Later, one Reddit user said that movie and its 1991 sequel — details below — “were disappointing without Larry Hagman, and there were some pretty big continuity errors, but [they were] still fun to watch.”
Another commenter chimed in, saying, “Ah yes. Wayne Rodgers was no Larry Hagman, unfortunately.”
And a third person said, “I remember watching this and hating the ending. And didn’t much care for Trapper John in the role of Tony, either. But it wasn’t a total disaster.”
Looking at the key art for Fifteen Years Later, however, one Reddit user realized that NBC’s standards-and-practices department must have finally eased its no-navel rule. “OMG, belly button!” that user wrote.
Another TV movie gave Jeannie yet another male costar
Eden played Jeannie again in the 1991 NBC movie I Still Dream of Jeannie — an imaginative title, we know — but Hagman opted out of that reunion, too. One potential new “master” for Jeannie is Mr. Simpson, played by Ken Kercheval, the same actor who played a nemesis of Hagman’s Dallas character.
And the reunion TV movies weren’t the end of the I Dream of Jeannie franchise. In the 1990s, the software company Trendmasters released I Dream of Jeannie computer games in which users could paint images of Jeannie, coloring book-style, or dress her up, paper-doll style. Between 2001 and 2002, Airwave Publishing released the comic books I Dream of Jeannie, I Dream of Jeannie: Tricks and Treat Annual, and I Dream of Jeannie Wishbook. And starting in 2015, gamblers could try to hit it big on a new I Dream of Jeannie slot machine. (Speaking of, an older Jeannie slot machine is currently on offer on eBay for a cool $2,400 — is that the answer to your dreams?)