PHOTO CREDIT: Above photo by John Rickman Photography, San Jose, California.

• Introduction
• On This Page: The TV Episodes
  • Batman
  • I Dream of Jeannie: Season 1
  • Max Headroom
  • Sex and the City: Season 2
  • Sex and the City: Season 3
  • Simpsons
  • Star Trek: Season 1
  • Star Trek: Season 2
  • Whose Line Is It Anyway?

• Related Articles

Every time a movie or television show features a belly dancing scene or even just a "harem girl" scene, it shapes someone's attitude toward our dance form. It can be useful to show some movie clips to our students to help them understand the role the mainstream entertainment industry has played in creating public opinion. It can also be fun to watch them, to see how portrayals have changed over the years.

It can be overwhelming to look at Maria's List of almost 200 television episodes, trying to decide which ones to seek out in search of belly dance scenes or portrayals of Middle Eastern women. The purpose of the mini-reviews is to provide further information on some of these shows, to help people prioritize which they may want to watch.

PHOTO CREDIT: Photo by Pixie Vision, Glendale, California.

In this episode of the old 1960's Batman television series, the Penguin runs for mayor. His campaign rally showcases the band Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Little Egypt does a high-energy dance performance with lots of spinning and torso undulations. It's about a minute in length.

Jeannie transforms Tony's living room into a harem scene. She and some lovely ladies that she blinks in for the occasion dance a bit for Tony. Jeannie herself does some good head slides and hip-twist shimmies. The other women have chicken-wing arms as they attempt to do hip lifts and other moves, then they run in a circle around Tony. It's silly and fun to watch, but very short - only about a minute in length.

A young Suhaila Salimpour dances in a seedy bar on a stage next to an enormous pig. The mood lighting and makeup make her appear rather unsavory, but her dancing is beautiful and fluid. The dance scene is short, and it's often hard to see her because she is mostly in the background while the show's main characters talk. Altogether, there is about 1 1/2 minutes of dancing, but only about 30 seconds of that is easy to see.

Although belly dancers are present and appear to be "real" belly dancers, there isn't much on-camera dancing - there's a bit of arm-waving and the occasional veil floats past the camera. The script makes two references to the belly dancers doing lap dances (even though real belly dancers certainly don't, and there is no lap dancing done by the dancers in this episode), and Mr. Big makes an annoying remark about having no money for cab fare because he stuffed all his 20's into the belly dancer's crotch. Yech.

This is the episode where Carrie and Miranda, in an effort to be more feminine, sign up for a "Goddess Workout" class. This is also the episode of Sex and the City that Dolphina refers to in her marketing materials when she talks about how one of her belly dance students at Crunch wrote her class into an episode. Well, there isn't much belly dancing to it. Mostly, people in the class are aimlessly waving a pair of scarves around in the air. The closest thing to belly dancing is when the instructor tells everyone to "Pop your hips!" I have to admit, I rather enjoy it when the two heroines decide they're out of there. All in all, the scene is somewhat boring and I don't see what it has to do with belly dance. But if you don't like all the New Age-y chakra talk on Dolphina's DVD's, you might enjoy the way this episode makes fun of her.

Homer goes to a bachelor party, which features a belly dancer as entertainment. Her skimpy costume is basically a bikini with a chiffon scarf tucked into the hip at each side. Later in the episode, when Homer goes looking for her, the places he visits in his search include girlie clubs - the sorts of places that have Vegas-style showgirls in bikinis and feathers. The tone of the entire episode suggests that he did something wrong by enjoying a belly dance performance.

There's only about 45 seconds of actual dancing in this episode, but it's quite intense. A character named Vina, with extraterrestrial assistance, crafts an illusion of herself as a sexy Orion Slave Girl. In the Star Trek mythos, Orion Slave Girls are the most desirable females in the galaxy. The dancer is a seductress, a vamp, a creature to be desired.

This episode opens with a belly dance scene. A dancer named Kara performs in a nightclub sort of setting as the officers from the Enterprise watch with great interest. The behavior of the audience is somewhat stereotypical — they're a group of men salivating over a beautiful woman, and Captain Kirk has arranged for the dancer to come to the table after her performance to meet Scotty. But I like it in spite of this because the dancing is worth watching.

• Mini-Reviews:
  • North American and European Movies With Either "Belly Dance" Or Middle Eastern Touches
  • Egyptian Movies with Dance Scenes
  • Television Shows
• Mass Media, Mass Stereotypes. How the North American and European entertainment industry has portrayed "Middle Eastern Dance"
• Have Belly, Will Travel. A review by Shira of Tanya Lemani's autobiography in which she describes what it was like to perform belly dance in plays, movies, and television shows during the 1960's.
• Full-Length Reviews of Movies with "Middle Eastern" Themes. By Shira.

• Lists:
  • Television Episodes with "Belly Dancing". By Maria.
  • Maria's Lists of Movies with "Belly Dancing"
    • Part 1, Made by U.S. production companies. Compiled by Maria.
    • Part 2, Made by European Production Companies. Compiled by Maria.
    • Part 3, Made by Production Companies Elsewhere. Compiled by Maria.
  • Egyptian Movies with Raqs Sharqi. Compiled by Maria and Shira.
  • Cartoons Featuring "Middle Eastern Dance". Compiled by Shira.