INTRODUCTION:
For several years Sidney Sheldon had been kicking around the idea of a genie story for a television situational comedy but he didn’t want the Burl Ives kind of genie as portrayed in the Brass Bottle (1964) rather he wanted a provocative genie that was at once seductive but also naive, he found his genie in Barbara Eden who played Jeannie from 1964 to 1970 in the hit television series I Dream of Jeannie. It was pure coincidence that in the late fall of 1964 Mr. Sheldon received as gift a bottle of Beam’s Choice Kentucky Bourbon packaged in a bottle commissioned from the T. C. Wheaton Glass Company. That’s right, the precious home of our 2000 year old Jeannie had its humble beginnings in a smoked crystal Bourbon bottle. Over the course of I Dream of Jeannie the bottle would undergo several transformations and even a replication as well as breakage, chipping and in the first season a substitute clear glass stopper but from day one it was an icon of interest created and mystified as only Hollywood’s dream factory could do. NAVIGATING THE HISTORY:
The following pages, accessed through the icons above, tell the story of how the T. C. Wheaton Company came to design this simplest of bottles, how the Jim Beam Distillery came to select it and finally of its transformation into Jeannie’s bottle for the first season of I Dream of Jeannie and then its redesign for the second through fifth seasons and finally its incarnation in the two reunion movies. | 
