Jean AKA Jeannie AKA Jeanie is a film, book, and magazine reviewer for a national magazine. Most of Jean’s work is done through email, which means he doesn't have to go into the office.
On a trip to find a gift for his girlfriend, Jean found an empty Genie Bottle. Upon picking up this bottle, Jean became the bottle’s new genie-powered occupant. Not only was Jean turned into a genie, but the bottle turned him into what he believed a genie of the bottle should look like. Which, due to his fascination with a classic 60s TV show, turned him into a busty blonde woman.
That edict was handed down because it was the middle of the Space Race, so helping either side could have huge political ramifications which could be traced back to the genies.
Jeanie helping get a rover unstuck on Mars a little faster than it might have otherwise gotten unstuck doesn’t violate the spirit of Haji’s edict at all. Assuming it’s even still in force, which is unlikely because the Space Race is long over.
What’s more, Jeannie is completely unaware of any such restriction, so could plead ignorance.
But this DOES tell us one thing – that Jeannie is perfectly capable poofing to, and of living on, Mars, with almost no atmosphere or oxygen, and surviving hard radiation exposure. That’s pretty cool.
Kattgirl: “Jeanie…could plead ignorance.” But ignorance is no excuse, yes? And besides, when has anyone ever let a mere genie explain herself.
No, i think Robert has it right. Her intervention is so minor, and the Cold War so long over, that what she’s done shouldn’t make a difference.
Besides, I want to focus on her becoming romantic with Neil.
But you know…if she lost her genie powers, even temporarily, as punishment for this, and instead found herself dependent on Neil’s support…Yeah that could work.
@Kattgirl: Don’t be so sure Jean is completely ignorant. Jean and Neil went back in time during I Dream of Technicolor (#383), and at the end of that story (#400), the look Jean and Neil exchange in the next-to-last panel suggests they know quite a lot they aren’t telling Rodge.
@50sRefugee:
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse”, yes – but that’s only true in societies that follow logical rules. This is a genie society that operates irrationally and at Haji’s whim.
This page is cute in a way I can’t explain. Now I wonder if Jeanie would choice to remain the anonymous hero, or brag about it. And even if she remain quiet about, I hope Neil’s notice what happen, after the “year” they just had, the poor guy needs a reminder that his all powerful besty/roomie/may-as-well-be his-wife-at-this-point, has a heart.
Oh, don’t let Jeanie hear you calling her Neil’s “may-as-well-be-wife”! She might turn you into a newt for that. And I can’t guarantee that you’d ever get better.
Neil’s ascending to the status of Jeanie’s might-as-well-be-husband must wait until he stops being a nebbish engineer and accepts his role as her Master. I’d love to see this happen, but I don’t look for it any time soon.
@Robert We could save ourselves this problems if Jeanie just leaves Neil as Natalie! Then we could just bother Rodge with the might-as-well-be-husband line, I am sure he wouldn’t mind!
The camera was indeed pointed away when Jean picked up the rover and moved it.
But it would have gotten a shot of the ground “as” it was being moved. So NASA would now have evidence that something is on mars that can move the rovers and the keep out of camera shot.
Yeah, but an explanation such as a slope collapse, a micrometeorite impact, or a mars-quake would probably all seem to be far more likely to the folks at NASA than the sudden appearance of a helpful intelligent creature.
It’ll probably just go down as one of those mysterious, unexplained things.
If I remember the original series correctly, Genies don’t show up in photographs and video.
There was an episode with a “self-driving” car (because Jeanie didn’t show up) and one when she got married (had to have a fake/mannequin).
Has that been established as not canon for the strip?
Yeah, everyone with the shape to fill it out properly. I tried to wear a LBD in public once, and it was confiscated as an unlicensed deadly weapon. People were going blind, because that was a better alternative than seeing me again.
Jeanie, now, Jeanie wears hers quite nicely, and seems to be enjoying it.
Normally, there is no way that the rover would be able to have its camera turn and snap a photo of Jeanie because in real life it takes upwards of 40 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Mars and a new command to travel back from Earth. Without that command, the rover will not turn it’s camera to look at something.
That being said, this is not real life and I’m going to bet if the rover did get a photo of Jeanie, the tin-foil hat crowd is going to scream this is proof the space exploration program is fake and NASA is doing all of this in a film studio. That would cause all kinds of grief for Neil.
Same rules in regards genies and cameras apply here, according to both the info page and the “I dream of Versimilitude” story ending. So the space exploration program should be safe.
Not if there are following the lead of the TV series of I Dream of Jeanie. Genie can’t be photographed, because, they are super natural beings. It to keep a hundred year old Photograph of Genie that look like he or she is only 20 years old. That could be a problem. So they don’t show up in pitchers.
I suppose that the camera could be programmed to periodically turn 360 degrees and snap pics, but as has been pointed out, Jeannie doesn’t show up, so no harm done.
No, it wasn’t programmed to turn around. There a ? mark there like the rover thinking which it can’t do, it just a program and can’t make any conscious decision like a human can. Martian rover choose to turn around like a thinking person would.
in real life the rovers are actually rather large. the last one was the size of an SUV and weighed nearly 2,000 pounds. jeanie must’ve popped in the size of a giant. not really a little guy.
Well, Pathfinder’s Sojourner was about that size. The movie The Martian portrays it correctly.
Spirit and Opportunity, according the Wikipedia, were 1.5 m (4.9 ft) high, 2.3 m (7.5 ft) wide and 1.6 m (5.2 ft) long. They weigh 180 kg (400 lb). When you adjust for Mars’ gravity, their weight drops to about 150-160 lbs.
My theory, Jean doesn’t know either the size of the rover nor that there isn’t (Earth breathable) air on Mars, and so the magic warped everything to confirm it to her prejudices. In short, Jean is like the coyote from the Bugs Bunny cartoons who isn’t affected by gravity until they notice they are standing on thin air.
That actually seems to be the way magic works in this comic: Jeannie doesn’t have to understand how things operate, she just imagines something happening, and the laws of nature adjust themselves accordingly. Pretty handy.
It’s mostly a thin little stink of a carbon-dioxide atmosphere, (about 0.1 PSI,) so likely sound wouldn’t transmit, but Jeannie seems to be breathing just fine, so either she magically brings her own air along with her, or else, as a genie, she doesn’t need it any more.
I wish Jeanie’s motherly admonition of “Don’t get stuck again” to have magical force.
Also, NASA has recently released audio of the wind blowing over Curiosity’s solar panels, so yeah, enough air for oblivious Jeanie to NOT NOTICE that she can’t talk before poofing out again.
@Jacqui, those kind of statements are so un-Jean like and the way that Jean use to act like. If it was just this one statement that Jean was it, I might agree with you. When you read Jeanie Bottle at the start, it is clearly a man in a female body when it comes to Jean vs Jeanie. When Jean became Jeanie, she didn’t want to be either a women or a Genie. But, now Jeanie would like to remain a Genie, but, not a female Genie. When Jeanie first became a Genie, she was still thinking on trying to get a girlfriend for Neil, but, after Neil night out with Belle as a Jean look alike, she has been increasingly getting more protective and even jealous of other women that look like or act like they might be interested in Neil. In other words, she starting to act like a girlfriend who trying to keep her guy friend to herself. By nature, all female Genie have a mother nature in them, because there there female Genie and that includes Jeanie too. Jeanie is gradually sliding in that direction as the series progresses. Jeanie been a Genie for over six month now and it may be even over eight months that she been a Genie now. Jean is little by little losing his identity as a mortal guy and gradually accepting her new identity as a blond female genie. It a slow process, but, it is happening.
1. The recording was from the Mars InSight lander, not Curiosity. 2. It isn’t really audio. It was a seismograph recording of vibrations caused by the wind, cranked up in speed and amplitude so the frequency was in a range we could hear, and its volume was loud enough to hear.
Some techs will be spending countless hours trying to figure out how the rover moved from where it was stuck on a slope to where it is now on a flat area.
So… here’s the consequences of this action. Depending on if the rover saw her, two things could happen. A: nasa freaks out because some woman was on mars without a space suit than poofed away. Or B: NASA freaks out that something picked up the rover, said something (assuming the rover picks up audio, I don’t know) then disappeared before they could get a look. So now aliens have been proven to nasa, to their knowledge.
What she should have done is use a little magic perhaps to help with the service so that nasa doesn’t freak out
Ah. Shive uses it a lot, so I suppose I just naturally attribute the comment to him. I stand corrected, though. If you ever start pointing out demonic-looking ducks of some sort, on the other hand . . .
“Call”? It will take 15 minutes before the information about rover being moved get to Earth, unless Jeanie also moved in time. Neil might already be there at that time.
OK, I admit it. I like Jeanie’s dress in the header, but I’m not so fond of the blue bolero she’s wearing over it. Too many colors.
So, quick and dirty, here are links to versions in black, to match the dress, and red, to match her cap.
imagizer.imageshack dot com/v2/640x480q90/924/ouKegs.png [I prefer this simple black one]
imagizer.imageshack dot com/v2/640x480q90/923/KwzpUN.png
[addresses munged to avoid the spam trap]
If these are suitable, could they be added to the fan art page?
Art complaint. Or suggestion for CD.
Final panel; looks like a sock draped over the antenna.
Going back, I see it’s just an odd-shaped rock (or rocks).
Photographers know to check for such accidental alignments so subjects don’t seem to have flagpoles growing out of their noggins.
Photographers do make that same mistake, though. Often in candid shots, but occasionally in poses. My gosh, huge advertising campaigns occasionally make similar blunders. It happens.
Ho-kay, I guess nobody besides myself and CD have seen Planet 51. Instead of using the six-legged design Neil showed to The Boss back back at the beginning of I Dream of Las Vegas, this rover is (obviously) Rover. Rover could probably see Jeanie itself–but couldn’t transmit the image back to Mission Control without the same mysterious lens flare mentioned in I Dream of Verisimilitude.
I think that Jeannie was also seen in a spacewalk with Major Nelson in the original series, but not by Mission Control.
No lander or rover sent to Mars has had a microphone on it. The Insight lander that touched down a few week ago can sort of pickup sound indirectly. From my understanding though, NASA’s next rover will have a mic on it.
Yea, that is what killed Spirit many years ago. It got stuck in a sand dune and never got out. As such when winter came it couldn’t angle its solar panels properly towards the Sun to get enough power and died. 🙁
Technically it wasn’t the slope which killed Spirit. It had dealt with such slopes without problem in the past. What prevented it from getting out the final time were the two wheels which had stopped turning. NASA had been driving Spirit backwards for years, to minimize the effect of the stuck wheels on directional control.
Genie law no messing with space exploration like Ms. Eden in the 70s will he lose his power and memories of Neil and become a mortal woman?
The rover didn’t catch her image when it happened, so she is still relatively safe for now.
That edict was handed down because it was the middle of the Space Race, so helping either side could have huge political ramifications which could be traced back to the genies.
Jeanie helping get a rover unstuck on Mars a little faster than it might have otherwise gotten unstuck doesn’t violate the spirit of Haji’s edict at all. Assuming it’s even still in force, which is unlikely because the Space Race is long over.
What’s more, Jeannie is completely unaware of any such restriction, so could plead ignorance.
But this DOES tell us one thing – that Jeannie is perfectly capable poofing to, and of living on, Mars, with almost no atmosphere or oxygen, and surviving hard radiation exposure. That’s pretty cool.
Kattgirl: “Jeanie…could plead ignorance.” But ignorance is no excuse, yes? And besides, when has anyone ever let a mere genie explain herself.
No, i think Robert has it right. Her intervention is so minor, and the Cold War so long over, that what she’s done shouldn’t make a difference.
Besides, I want to focus on her becoming romantic with Neil.
But you know…if she lost her genie powers, even temporarily, as punishment for this, and instead found herself dependent on Neil’s support…Yeah that could work.
@Kattgirl: Don’t be so sure Jean is completely ignorant. Jean and Neil went back in time during I Dream of Technicolor (#383), and at the end of that story (#400), the look Jean and Neil exchange in the next-to-last panel suggests they know quite a lot they aren’t telling Rodge.
@50sRefugee:
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse”, yes – but that’s only true in societies that follow logical rules. This is a genie society that operates irrationally and at Haji’s whim.
This page is cute in a way I can’t explain. Now I wonder if Jeanie would choice to remain the anonymous hero, or brag about it. And even if she remain quiet about, I hope Neil’s notice what happen, after the “year” they just had, the poor guy needs a reminder that his all powerful besty/roomie/may-as-well-be his-wife-at-this-point, has a heart.
Oh, don’t let Jeanie hear you calling her Neil’s “may-as-well-be-wife”! She might turn you into a newt for that. And I can’t guarantee that you’d ever get better.
Neil’s ascending to the status of Jeanie’s might-as-well-be-husband must wait until he stops being a nebbish engineer and accepts his role as her Master. I’d love to see this happen, but I don’t look for it any time soon.
@Robert We could save ourselves this problems if Jeanie just leaves Neil as Natalie! Then we could just bother Rodge with the might-as-well-be-husband line, I am sure he wouldn’t mind!
Neil’s probably going to need to edit Jean out of its footage somehow.
I wonder if Haji’s earlier proclamation of genies to not interfere or give aid with humanity’s space travel attempts is still in effect?
Naw, take a look at the camera in the first three panels – she was out of the shot, so no editing needed.
And that no-interference order was 50+ years ago, back when politics was involved. Long over, now.
The camera was indeed pointed away when Jean picked up the rover and moved it.
But it would have gotten a shot of the ground “as” it was being moved. So NASA would now have evidence that something is on mars that can move the rovers and the keep out of camera shot.
@Fearless:
Yeah, but an explanation such as a slope collapse, a micrometeorite impact, or a mars-quake would probably all seem to be far more likely to the folks at NASA than the sudden appearance of a helpful intelligent creature.
It’ll probably just go down as one of those mysterious, unexplained things.
Unless, of course… Jeannie left footprints…
If I remember the original series correctly, Genies don’t show up in photographs and video.
There was an episode with a “self-driving” car (because Jeanie didn’t show up) and one when she got married (had to have a fake/mannequin).
Has that been established as not canon for the strip?
Is canon, both in the info page, and the ending ot the “I dream of a Verisimilitude” storyline.
One thing is certain: CD has seen Planet 51.
Oh hey, looks like there’s a new banner! Jeanie’s lookin’ super cute in that New Years party ensemble.
OMG! I am so glad that Jeannie likes to play dress-up. 🙂
Oh, yeah. Everyone needs a LBD in their closet.
Yeah, everyone with the shape to fill it out properly. I tried to wear a LBD in public once, and it was confiscated as an unlicensed deadly weapon. People were going blind, because that was a better alternative than seeing me again.
Jeanie, now, Jeanie wears hers quite nicely, and seems to be enjoying it.
@50s:
Oh, dammit, you had to go and say that, and put the image into my head. Where’s that bottle of brain bleach?
@Kattgirl – in the liquor cabinet, of course.
Normally, there is no way that the rover would be able to have its camera turn and snap a photo of Jeanie because in real life it takes upwards of 40 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Mars and a new command to travel back from Earth. Without that command, the rover will not turn it’s camera to look at something.
That being said, this is not real life and I’m going to bet if the rover did get a photo of Jeanie, the tin-foil hat crowd is going to scream this is proof the space exploration program is fake and NASA is doing all of this in a film studio. That would cause all kinds of grief for Neil.
In the show camera are unable to take photos of genies, so not need to worry there I think.
Same rules in regards genies and cameras apply here, according to both the info page and the “I dream of Versimilitude” story ending. So the space exploration program should be safe.
I was unable to edit my reply to you after posting it for some reason, so don’t mind all those spelling mistakes 🙁
Not if there are following the lead of the TV series of I Dream of Jeanie. Genie can’t be photographed, because, they are super natural beings. It to keep a hundred year old Photograph of Genie that look like he or she is only 20 years old. That could be a problem. So they don’t show up in pitchers.
I suppose that the camera could be programmed to periodically turn 360 degrees and snap pics, but as has been pointed out, Jeannie doesn’t show up, so no harm done.
No, it wasn’t programmed to turn around. There a ? mark there like the rover thinking which it can’t do, it just a program and can’t make any conscious decision like a human can. Martian rover choose to turn around like a thinking person would.
in real life the rovers are actually rather large. the last one was the size of an SUV and weighed nearly 2,000 pounds. jeanie must’ve popped in the size of a giant. not really a little guy.
Well, Pathfinder’s Sojourner was about that size. The movie The Martian portrays it correctly.
Spirit and Opportunity, according the Wikipedia, were 1.5 m (4.9 ft) high, 2.3 m (7.5 ft) wide and 1.6 m (5.2 ft) long. They weigh 180 kg (400 lb). When you adjust for Mars’ gravity, their weight drops to about 150-160 lbs.
My theory, Jean doesn’t know either the size of the rover nor that there isn’t (Earth breathable) air on Mars, and so the magic warped everything to confirm it to her prejudices. In short, Jean is like the coyote from the Bugs Bunny cartoons who isn’t affected by gravity until they notice they are standing on thin air.
@Doug:
That actually seems to be the way magic works in this comic: Jeannie doesn’t have to understand how things operate, she just imagines something happening, and the laws of nature adjust themselves accordingly. Pretty handy.
Mars does have a atmosphere just not much of one, so sound will work there somewhat.
It’s mostly a thin little stink of a carbon-dioxide atmosphere, (about 0.1 PSI,) so likely sound wouldn’t transmit, but Jeannie seems to be breathing just fine, so either she magically brings her own air along with her, or else, as a genie, she doesn’t need it any more.
Fairly OddParents established genies can talk and live on Mars. Apparently CD agrees with that.
I wish Jeanie’s motherly admonition of “Don’t get stuck again” to have magical force.
Also, NASA has recently released audio of the wind blowing over Curiosity’s solar panels, so yeah, enough air for oblivious Jeanie to NOT NOTICE that she can’t talk before poofing out again.
Bravo, CD! I am smiling with the cuteness.
And, yeah, New Year’s Jeanie is the hotness.
I don’t see how anything Jean did was “motherly”.
Jacqui, I thought her “There you go, little guy” had a motherly sound to it. But I tend to over-read things like that. Not a big deal.
@Jacqui, those kind of statements are so un-Jean like and the way that Jean use to act like. If it was just this one statement that Jean was it, I might agree with you. When you read Jeanie Bottle at the start, it is clearly a man in a female body when it comes to Jean vs Jeanie. When Jean became Jeanie, she didn’t want to be either a women or a Genie. But, now Jeanie would like to remain a Genie, but, not a female Genie. When Jeanie first became a Genie, she was still thinking on trying to get a girlfriend for Neil, but, after Neil night out with Belle as a Jean look alike, she has been increasingly getting more protective and even jealous of other women that look like or act like they might be interested in Neil. In other words, she starting to act like a girlfriend who trying to keep her guy friend to herself. By nature, all female Genie have a mother nature in them, because there there female Genie and that includes Jeanie too. Jeanie is gradually sliding in that direction as the series progresses. Jeanie been a Genie for over six month now and it may be even over eight months that she been a Genie now. Jean is little by little losing his identity as a mortal guy and gradually accepting her new identity as a blond female genie. It a slow process, but, it is happening.
1. The recording was from the Mars InSight lander, not Curiosity. 2. It isn’t really audio. It was a seismograph recording of vibrations caused by the wind, cranked up in speed and amplitude so the frequency was in a range we could hear, and its volume was loud enough to hear.
Hm, isn’t that camera an off the shelf webcam?
NASA’s budget has been stretched pretty thin recently.
*clap* *clap* *clap*
Maybe some nerd in the program stole the real camera to help him spy on supermodels?
That might be part of Neil’s value to the design team – figuring out how to use OTS components to save money and weight.
Some techs will be spending countless hours trying to figure out how the rover moved from where it was stuck on a slope to where it is now on a flat area.
So… here’s the consequences of this action. Depending on if the rover saw her, two things could happen. A: nasa freaks out because some woman was on mars without a space suit than poofed away. Or B: NASA freaks out that something picked up the rover, said something (assuming the rover picks up audio, I don’t know) then disappeared before they could get a look. So now aliens have been proven to nasa, to their knowledge.
What she should have done is use a little magic perhaps to help with the service so that nasa doesn’t freak out
The rover saw her, but she wouldn’t show up on any film. That said, I feel Neil will find out somehow or another.
EDIT – I hope you paid Dan Shive for using his might-as-well-be-trademarked excuse up there, Robert 😉
“A wizard did it” is much older than EGS, Mr. Abides. 🙂
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AWizardDidIt
Ah. Shive uses it a lot, so I suppose I just naturally attribute the comment to him. I stand corrected, though. If you ever start pointing out demonic-looking ducks of some sort, on the other hand . . .
In my book, that would be an even more important reason to call Neil in to work.
“It suddenly moved five feet! It was like it got carried!!!”
“Call”? It will take 15 minutes before the information about rover being moved get to Earth, unless Jeanie also moved in time. Neil might already be there at that time.
OK, I admit it. I like Jeanie’s dress in the header, but I’m not so fond of the blue bolero she’s wearing over it. Too many colors.
So, quick and dirty, here are links to versions in black, to match the dress, and red, to match her cap.
imagizer.imageshack dot com/v2/640x480q90/924/ouKegs.png [I prefer this simple black one]
imagizer.imageshack dot com/v2/640x480q90/923/KwzpUN.png
[addresses munged to avoid the spam trap]
If these are suitable, could they be added to the fan art page?
Aww, I like the blue. It goes well with her red lipstick. 🙂
Your edit with the red bolero does look good, though.
The blue contrasts well with the red–but it’s an extra color. There’s no theme.
@50srefugee – she looks hot. That’s the theme.
Art complaint. Or suggestion for CD.
Final panel; looks like a sock draped over the antenna.
Going back, I see it’s just an odd-shaped rock (or rocks).
Photographers know to check for such accidental alignments so subjects don’t seem to have flagpoles growing out of their noggins.
heh heh. I thought it was a racoon tail.
Photographers do make that same mistake, though. Often in candid shots, but occasionally in poses. My gosh, huge advertising campaigns occasionally make similar blunders. It happens.
Ho-kay, I guess nobody besides myself and CD have seen Planet 51. Instead of using the six-legged design Neil showed to The Boss back back at the beginning of I Dream of Las Vegas, this rover is (obviously) Rover. Rover could probably see Jeanie itself–but couldn’t transmit the image back to Mission Control without the same mysterious lens flare mentioned in I Dream of Verisimilitude.
I think that Jeannie was also seen in a spacewalk with Major Nelson in the original series, but not by Mission Control.
Oh, I saw Planet 51, Tom, and loved it. It was a lot of fun.
Dog damm, I guessed it! xD
You did! I was so excited when a commenter totally got it right yesterday. I couldn’t confirm it beforehand, though. Spoilers, and all. 🙂
with that dealt with maybe now we can see Jean as a sexy elf next to Santa.
nice banner
Isn’ The Rover something like 6 feet across? That would make Jeanie about 50 feet tall.
So … reference to another old movie?
The Curiority rover is about that big, but there have been much smaller ones.
Jean doesn’t need magic to talk on Mars, Mars has an atmosphere, albeit a very thin one with no oxygen
Granted, her voice would be muffled and extremely low pitched, but still intelligible
As for breathing? Technically she’s only there for a few seconds, wouldn’t even need to inhale, though as a genie she probably still could and be fine
No lander or rover sent to Mars has had a microphone on it. The Insight lander that touched down a few week ago can sort of pickup sound indirectly. From my understanding though, NASA’s next rover will have a mic on it.
SaylorA Yeah, i think the wind noises were extracted from, of all places, the seismometer.
I think the camera in panel four caught the pink poof. Only Neal will know what the poof really is.
Sand in the wheels?
Looks like it got caught on a dusty slope and couldn’t make any forward progress. Like getting stuck in the mud while off-roading.
Yea, that is what killed Spirit many years ago. It got stuck in a sand dune and never got out. As such when winter came it couldn’t angle its solar panels properly towards the Sun to get enough power and died. 🙁
Technically it wasn’t the slope which killed Spirit. It had dealt with such slopes without problem in the past. What prevented it from getting out the final time were the two wheels which had stopped turning. NASA had been driving Spirit backwards for years, to minimize the effect of the stuck wheels on directional control.