Obviously, this is where Sidney Sheldon got the idea for his TV series "I Dream Of Jeannie", except the genie was made female (Barbara Eden) and her master an astronaut (Larry Hagman). IMHO, "Jeannie" is more enjoyable than this film, which tends to stretch the plot out too much and therefore the 22 minute running time of the TV series doesn't tax one's interest.
shareArabian genies are pretty generic -- they've been the stuff of folklore for thousands of years. Aside from the basic concept of a man in modern times bedeviled by a genie who wants nothing more than to serve and please him but usually ends up causing him trouble, this movie has little in common with the later I Dream of Jeannie TV series.
All the universe . . . or nothingness. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?
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You could look at any generic genie story pre-Jeannie and say that they are exactly the same. These two productions have nothing to do with each other. There were only 3 months between the release of this film and the Jeannie tv show. The show was obviously in the works long before that.
Here's a video of Barbara Eden talking about it. One of the first things she says is that she had been reading about it (the Jeannie tv show) for 8 months before she even auditioned for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFvP7E6xlio
And if you care to ask Sheldon himself (I don't), I'm sure you'll find the info somewhere in this 2.5 hour interview with him:
http://youtu.be/Fk-imyxWdcY
Yeah but they both starred Barbara Eden. And BB had Tony Randall, and the other star of IDOJ (Larry Hagman) was named Tony. Could be coincidence I guess.
Did anyone notice that the man who played the father (the one who got turned into a mule) played McMahon or Tate on "Bewicthed"? Actually, it was McMahon, because he was not Larry Tate.