Before you judge me, or anybody, for watching Saved by the Bell try to think back to your childhood. As most things, my memories of Saved by the Bell aren't about the 'quality' of the show, but rather the Saturday mornings spent as a kid with no worries and no responsibilities.Well, here it is. The answers you have been waiting for. First, let me start off my talking a little bit about
Saved By The Bell (
SbtB).
SbtB originally started as a pilot for NBC titled
Good Morning Miss Bliss (
GMMB). This pilot had no of the original cast members, and actually including Jaleel White (Steve Urkeal from
Family Matters). NBC passed on the idea to run it and Disney picked it up running 13 episodes.
GMMB on Disney had Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zack Morris, Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers, Lark Voorhies as Lisa Turtle and Dennis Haskins as Mr. Belding... all the familar characters. However, confusing to a lot of fans, these 'middle-school' years were set at JFK Junior High in Indianapolis. After they graduated Junior High, NBC took it back, changed the name, moved it to California and introduced Mario Lopez as Slater, Tiffani Amber-Thiessen as Kelly and Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie. Now we have the whole crew. The HS years of
SbtB raised a lot of questions. Zack talks about a 2-year relationship with Kelly in the first episode of
SbtB, but she was never mentioned in
GMMB. Zack and Jessie, according to
SbtB, were friends since 1st grade. Where was she in
GMMB? No one knows. My theory is this. Producers of
GMMB did not anticipate the show to do as well as it did, so they had to introduce characters and give them history.
Now, I am not going to go into the Malibu Sands episodes nor am I going to talk about any of the TV movies. If you have any questions about those, feel free to ask though.
SbtB ran for the four years of Highschool. However, halfway through 12th Grade, Kelly and Jessie decided to leave the show to pursue other opportunities. They had already filmed the HS graduation episode so they decided to jet. The producers struggled to fill the gap, thus developing a new transfer student named Tori (Leanna Creel). Instead of writing into the script that Kelly and Jessie left, they wrote around it. The viewer was supposed to think that during the episode you were watching, Kelly and Jessie were just in another class or gone. Yeah, we didn't think that at all.
Well after that they went on to
Saved by the Bell: The College Years. Slater, Zack and Screech all were part of the original cast. Well, into the first season, Kelly decided she wanted in again and conveniently 'transferred' to California University to be close to Zack. After 19 episode of
SbtB:tCY NBC cancelled the show but decided to let producer Peter Engel tie up some loose ends, thus the TV Movie
Saved by the Bell: The Wedding (Zack and Kelly's, you moron).
Here's a couple of dates that will make you feel really old:
Good Morning Miss Bliss pilot on NBC: 1987
GMMB on Disney: winter '98 - spring '99
Saved by the Bell, the original series: debuted NBC on August 20, 1989
Tori years: '92 - '93
College Years Pilot: September 7, 1993
The Wedding: October 7th, 1994