Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Mario Lopez, Dustin Diamond, Lark Voorhies,
Elizabeth Berkley, Tiffani Amber Thiessen, Dennis Haskins | Created by Sam Bobrick
UK certification 12 | UK RRP £29.99 | Runtime 362 minutes | Directed by Don Barnhart & Garry Shimokawa
As someone who grew up in the 90s, I can clearly remember Saved by the Bell as one of those hugely popular American shows, targeted primarily at teens, that aired on virtually every day of the week. And I never caught a single episode in my childhood.
For some reason or another — probably because I was younger than the intended audience — the show never once appealed to me. I always used to hear the crazily addictive theme song and either walk out the room or change the channel, probably to another '90s show from the USA like Sabrina the Teenage Witch. But now that I'm in the final few months of being in that intended demographic — a teenager — albeit probably a little too close to 20, how would I react when sat down with the original season?
Saved by the Bell began as Good Morning, Miss Bliss, a Walt Disney series which was born in 1987 that detailed the lives of students at junior high. But it got canceled after 13 episodes. Fast forward to 1989 and the characters returned, at high school, bigger and better in Saved by the Bell, a colourfully mixed bag of laughs within a 16-episode first season, produced by NBC, that became the most popular show geared towards teenagers in television history.
The programme is centred around the everyday classroom antics of six friends — only they're a bit of an odd bunch, as they each conform to their own social stereotypes and have very different personalities, which explains the love-hate relationships that the characters have throughout the season. Leading the main teenage cast is Zack Morris, an arrogant preppy troublemaker who has a penchant for scheming, and could essentially be summed up as the Bart Simpson of the show. Then there's Slater, a muscle-head wrestler, and Screech, a skinny, curly-haired dweeb with gormless idiocy foaming from his mouth at the same time as having intelligence coming out of his ears. As for the girls, you've got Jessie, the super-smart one; Lisa, Little Miss Fashion, and finally Kelly, the most popular girl in school. So popular in fact, that Zack and Slater are constantly fighting over her affection, and finding new ways to get one over on one another and find the key to Kelly's heart. It's an impressive young cast (at the time), and an original concept for a show to collide such polar opposites together in a circle of friendship.
Watching the show in 2010, 21 years after it first aired in the States, it is no surprise that Saved by the Bell looks dated, especially with the first season being from '89, but that's all the fun of watching in the present day, and that's what the show is — a lot of fun. Once the familiar theme song kicks in and the corny opening credits sequence rolls, just sit back, relax, and wonder how on earth those clothes were fashionable in the '80s. Try and laugh, too. Well, hopefully you will seeing as that's the point of the show. Knowing most 15-year-olds these days, Saved by the Bell is just going to look too old to be enjoyed, so I'd say this three-disc set will mostly be seen by the “purists” from way back when, but the humour isn't too low-brow for adult audiences and it's sure to bring on a few laughs here and there.
Some of the jokes fall flat on their face and are a little cringe-worthy, but others will have you cracking up at their sheer cheese. A little slapstick combined with slim running times, witty writing and good old light-hearted fun makes the first season of Saved by the Bell an enjoyable watch, if not a little awkward at times whenever Screech walks on screen, seeing as how the actor who played him, Dustin Diamond, went on to sell out years later as an adult with a book deal to spread very questionable information about the four-year run of the show, as well as make a disgusting sex tape to help aid his fledgling career. It's a bit strange watching him as a kid and knowing what his future was to hold come the 2000s, but oh well, just enjoy the ride.
EXTRAS ★ I was extremely surprised to see that this is the first ever UK DVD release of the show, and probably will be for a long, long time to come, so I expected a pretty well-supplemented package. Unfortunately this is not the case and the only extra, despite being labeled as “extras”, is a short gallery of publicity stills from the programme's inception. Not only that, but the gallery is entitled “Publicity Photo's”. Whoever designed the menus for the third disc has immortalised themselves in a digital medium with a punctuation error!