Genies are tricksters. Be careful what you wish for. In some tales, the actual wording of the wish you make begats unforeseen consequences. You wish you were rich...and the bill collectors show up. You wish you had a new car...and it's a car belonging to some wealthy drug lord...You wish you were famous...and it turns out you are that wealthy drug lord, pursued by bounty hunters...in that new sportscar you wished for. Nice.
And that's three wishes, already. Some tales hint about wishing for more wishes...others say ixnay on the 'wishing for more wishes'. Next Master, please.
And there's the character of the Djinn, or Genie. They rarely ever look like Robin Williams or Barbara Eden in these stories. The genie of 1001 Arabian Knights has more in common with Jafar when he became a genie in Disney's Aladdin. The business of Tony Nelson marrying 'Jeannie' was inspired by Bewitched, which was inspired by the movies I Married A Witch and Bell,Book and Candle...which might be inspired by the farcical "romance" scenes with Titania the Fairy Queen & Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream...that theory is entirely mine..though I don't think it's an original conclusion; I haven't checked if anyone else saw that.
There is a genie of sorts in Doctor Who: The Stone Rose, but the selling point of the novel was the 10th Doctor & Rose investigating the origin of a stone statue dating back to ancient Rome resembling Rose Tyler residing in the British Museum in London. Yes, this predates the episode revealing that the 11th Doctor's sidekick, Rory Williams, was working at the same museum as a security guard, so there's some wibbly-wobbly overlap for a potential future "Past Doctor Who Adventure" for Gareth Roberts or James Goss to type up if they want...they'll just need to have an icebag ready to deal with resolving continuity headaches. I'm not going to do this, so I can keep mulling over it.
The genie in Stone Rose is a Genetically Engineered Neural Imagination Engine. Described as a small, scaly creature, a cross between a baby dragon and a duck-billed platypus.
And...this "Genie" talks like Flintstones character The Great Gazoo. The best stuff in Stone Rose is the stuff with this G.E.N.I.E., but he appears in the last quarter of the book, so it's all plot denouement rather than plot & character development; it becomes a Saturday Morning Doctor Who...with animation by Filmation, likely, but the concept of this magical creature, particularly the dragon-like description and Gazoo-esque personality, stayed in my brain years after reading the book.
It reminded me of other characters from other places. The best example is the wish-granting, genetically-engineered lab experiment resembling a dragon that appeared in an issue of World's Finest, featuring Superman & Batman, in a story written by Dennis O'Neil. Doesn't that sound like a likely inspiration? There are plenty of fantasy stories about a stopwatch that stops time, for example. Stories about magic dragons granting wishes, in summantion, sound more frequent than one would think. While preparing this post, I remembered Figment, the magic dragon from Epcot Center at Walt Disney World who had his own comic book series from Marvel Comics a few years ago. There are also Pocket Dragons, Smurf-like plastic figurines of cutsey baby dragons that even had their own cartoon show at one point. I'm absolutely convinced that G.E.N.I.E could've been based on one or any of these things.
So..in time for the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, original novels like The Stone Rose were reprinted..in this case, because it counted as an historical adventure (everyone seems to just remember the David Tennant Doctor facing a lion in the arena, go figure). And..according to Wikipedia, it was the best-selling of the Doctor Who novels from the current series, so that's something, although maybe those Douglas Adams-branded novelizations of Adams' Who scripts might've bumped that down a few notches by now.
So the newer edition of Stone Rose came with an introduction by the author, Jacqueline Rayner. Would she bring up the G.E.N.I.E character? Yeah, she did. Should I buy this book? Yeah, I did. Did she confirm all that you thought inspired the character? No, she didn't - she claimed she was inspired by the severed monkey's paw from "The Monkey's Paw", which, to my knowledge, does not feature any dragon-platypus hybrids. Maybe she gave that answer because the plot mechanics in that last quarter do echo the story, but the reference that inspired the visual of the G.E.N.I.E is not there, so that may be her way of dodging any concern about copyrights and trademarks.
It's like this: I think I solved a puzzle, but the answer key provided to check is some kind of nonsense, so I'm just left with a gathering of stray observations that fit into something that made the book more-appealing past it's sell-by date, but will just stay scattered in the air...be careful what you wish for..
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