A couple of folks wrote to ask what else I remembered about going to the audience testing for I Dream of Jeannie and Camp Runamuck. As I recall, it was early in 1965, several weeks before either was announced as a series, so our reaction may have been a factor in them landing on the NBC fall schedule. I'm pretty sure both pilots that were shown to us that afternoon were longer than what aired the following September and different in a number of ways.
The venue for the testing was a place called Preview House up on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Fairfax. I went with a friend of mine named Steve Hopkins and we had to wait in line for quite a bit. Through some confusion, we were actually a bit too old to be there — the testing was of kids 12 and under, and we were thirteen, but they let us in. We were shown to seats equipped with little handheld dials on cords. You could turn the dial all the way to the left to indicate you didn't like what you were seeing or rotate it to the right to show approval. Steve and I took our assignments seriously but a lot of boys and girls around us seemed to be just randomly spinning the thing because it was fun. As I recall, the place held around 200 of us.
A gentleman came out and talked a while, making it sound like the entire future of commercial broadcast television was in our hot little hands. Then he taught us how to use our dials and showed us a Mr. Magoo cartoon. I'm not sure if the man said this or if I read it somewhere later but the idea was that the Magoo film was the "control." It was shown at every Preview House screening and our responses to it would be measured against the responses of other test audiences to see how we weighed in against them. When we were asked if we had any questions, Steve wanted to know if our responses were individually recorded. Did they register that the person in Seat A-7 liked this or that? Or did they just record the responses of the audience as a whole? The host said he couldn't get into technical things like that and so we never found out. I might have felt a lot less self-conscious if I'd known.
Questionnaires were then passed out. We'd been promised that there'd be a drawing later for prizes and we were now asked to decide which items we'd select if we were the lucky ones. For instance, someone was going to win a case of cookies. In the booklet were photos of about ten popular brands of cookies and you had to check off which kind you'd like if you won. You then had to pick which candy bar you'd want if you won the case of candy bars and which kind of cereal you'd want if you won the case of cereal and so on. It seemed rather odd to me to have everyone fill out their choices this way. Why couldn't they do the drawing and then ask just the winner which brand of soft drink he or she wanted? Hmm…
After we all filled out the forms and passed them in, we were shown the Camp Runamuck pilot, which we kinda liked. It took place at a summer camp where the counselors were more childish than the youthful campers, and there was a lot of physical comedy and food fighting. I remember thinking that it was copied from the Disney movie, The Parent Trap, even to the point of having the same actor (Frank DeVol) play the camp supervisor. As I later learned, self-plagiarism was at work. The Parent Trap was written and directed by a man named David Swift…and David Swift was also the creator of Camp Runamuck. (Frank DeVol, by the way, was replaced when the series debuted the following fall. I hope my clumsy dialing wasn't the reason.)
We filled out some forms about how we liked what we'd seen, then it came time for the second pilot, which was preceded by several commercials — one for cookies, one for candy bars, one for cereal and so on. Then came the I Dream of Jeannie pilot, which we liked a lot. I darn near broke the dial, whirling it clockwise every time Barbara Eden was on the screen. Forms were passed out for our comments on Jeannie, and if there'd been a place I could have written something in, I'd have been the first person to ever demand they show Barbara Eden's navel.
As these packets were collected, someone called our host away and informed him of some dire news which he then passed on to us. Apparently, there was a problem with those questionnaires we'd filled out earlier — the ones where we picked the kind of cookie we'd want if we won the case of cookies, the kind of candy bar we'd want if we won the case of candy bars, etc. "We accidentally gave some of you the wrong questionnaire so just to be fair, we're going to ask you all to fill them out again!" New forms were passed out and Steve and I both noted that in each category, one possible selection was a product which had been in one of those commercials we'd seen and…
Hey, you don't suppose it was all a test to see if those commercials had caused us to change our minds, do you? Naah, they couldn't have been that sneaky.
That was about it. We were told that if we won the prizes, we'd be notified…and of course, we weren't. Given how sneaky these people were about getting us to fill out the prize form a second time, I'm skeptical that anyone got a case of anything. The host thanked us for coming and out we went. I suppose we should have felt somewhat exploited but it was kind of cool. The next week at school, we could tell our classmates that NBC had tested its new shows on us…and of course, we made it sound like the Head of Programming had called us into his offices and said, "Mark…Steve…I value your judgment so much that I'm going to let you program Friday night at 7:30!" Soon after, when Camp Runamuck and I Dream of Jeannie were announced, we could flaunt that we'd seen them, whereas the commoners had to wait 'til September. (Runamuck was a quick flop but managed to last all of one season. Jeannie was a hit for five years.)
Whatever "specialness" we'd felt at being a part of a select testing audience pretty much evaporated over the next year or so. Preview House got very active, I guess, because everywhere you went in L.A., there were teenagers handing out passes to go there and watch pilots and win valuable prizes. I declined at least one a week.
A friend of mine went once and reported back that he'd seen the pilot for a Batman TV show starring someone named Adam West. He'd also seen the same Mr. Magoo cartoon plus some pilot that never made it to series, and they'd done the same stunt about redoing the questionnaires that told them which prizes you wanted if you won the drawing, which I still don't think anyone ever did. I don't know how much the networks paid them to run this operation but I'll bet it was enough that they could have afforded to send someone a case of cereal once in a while. If anyone who was ever involved with Preview House reads this, I still want Cheerios.