Saved by the Bell/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adorkable: Screech before his voice changed. He was such a cute, dorky little kid & far less annoying.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: A popular alternate take on Zack Morris is basically that he's a sociopath who treats the rest of the characters as pawns for his schemes and will go to any lengths to manipulate them into doing his bidding.
    • The other theory is that Zack is a living god who constructed the entire world of Bayside solely to stroke his own ego and twist mortals to his whims. After all, within the show Zack can stop time at will, and in several instances he actually messes with people while they're time-stopped.
      • Adding on to the above theory, DC Comics and Superman fans could suggest that Zack might be Mr. Mxyzptlk.
    • There's also the one about Jessie being a man. Whether Slater is aware of this is kept vague, but the general consensus seems to be that he'd not mind one bit.
  • Anvilicious: No aesop is subtle. Especially involving ducks, you bastards.
    • Well this was a show filmed during the 1980's and 1990's, after all.
  • Critical Research Failure: The episode where oil is found on school property has this in spades. As do most episodes involving any vaguely science-related class. Though it did get the planets right in the memorable acronym. For its era, at least.
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: The middle part of the High School finale, where they say they'll miss each other; Jessie and Slater cuddling on the stairs with her saying "And you'll always be my papa... you big pig!" and as she saw him giving his Valedictorian position over to Jessie, Lisa giving Screech a kiss on the cheek. It was very charming.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Zack in Good Morning Miss Bliss, Kelly and Screech in SBTB proper.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: In one episode, Zack, Slater and Lisa get drunk at a party and then try to drive home. Zack crashes the car. They all scramble to fix everything and repeatedly lie to try to avoid trouble. Of course, they get found out, but only after their cover story gets so overly complicated and full of conflicting details. In other words, stick to the same lie or else you'll get caught for what you did wrong.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Zack and Lisa, in part because of Victorious Childhood Friend syndrome.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: It's hard to look at the episode about the oil on the school property while the Gulf of Mexico is in its current state.
    • Lisa's response when Kelly says that she always wanted to be a princess: "Well, if anything ever happens to Princess Di..."
  • Ho Yay: Screech and Belding, in The New Class.
    • Not to mention Zack and Slater. They got their own video, which naturally didn't neglect to include scenes related to the George Michael concert they were going to go to or the bits involving ballet. With the amount of drag and homoerotic and gay subtext, this show certainly has its queer edge.
    • This line from "Screech's Woman" shortly AFTER Slater recognizes Screech's date as Zack in drag:

Slater: Morris??? (looks down) Nice legs.

    • Jessie stares crying at a recently married Kelly for just a little bit longer than strictly necessary.
  • Marty Stu: Let's face it, Zach Morris gets unbelievably high SAT scores with a fictional Ivory-League college pining for him, despite him having a billion drop-out worthy things on his record and never studying a DAY IN HIS LIFE, gets a new girl every other episode, (which he promptly pushes outside of the universe into a vast pit of darkness that is discontinuity), is one of the most popular guys in school, stops time, plays with his acquaintances like puppets on strings and suffers NO actual repercussions for it, oh, god, the list goes on and on! (AKA Gary-Stu)
  • Guilty Pleasure: Jessie's caffeine pill-induced freakout is known to be rewatched over and over for its Narm.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Screech's entire characterization of being The Friend Nobody Likes. In Real life, Dustin Diamond is outright hostile to his former castmates.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember when Jessie talked about how auctioning off dates is "flesh peddling and should be strictly forbidden." Her actress goes on to star in Showgirls.
  • Hollywood Homely: All of the "nerd" girls, most notably Tori Spelling, but also Louise (aka the Queen of the Nerds), whose actress was basically just given huge goggle-like glasses and had her hair mussed to make her look nerdier.
  • Mary Sue: Tori appeared to be one, based on the fact that the show tried to beat us over the head with the idea that she was a match for Zack's wit. On her very first day of school, she waltzes in and manages to shut Zack up (yes, Zack, the wittiest person in the school) with a quick one-liner every single time he opens his mouth. Meanwhile, the uber-popular Lisa literally begs Tori to be her buddy, as though Kelly and Jessie didn't exist (somewhat justified, as they didn't appear in the same episodes as Tori). And Slater eventually develops a crush on her, though she's portrayed as being too good for him. Not to mention the fact that the characters keep gushing about how awesome she supposedly is. Even Screech, who's normally devoted to Lisa to the point where he's a Stalker with a Crush, just suddenly abandons his Lisa obsession and falls insanely in love with Tori.
  • Memetic Mutation: "I'M SO EXCITED! I'M SO EXCITED! I'M, SO... SCARED!"
  • Narm: Jessie's caffeine pill addiction, the Elvis episode, dear god the Elvis episode, though in the case of the Elvis episode it was probably intentional.
  • OT3: In-universe example...well at least in Screech's mind. In the episode where he falls in love with Tori, who is dating Zack, Tori ends up having to pretend to be interested in Screech to win a bet with Zack, but asks Screech to allow her to continue seeing Zack at the same time. Screech responds "Ahhh, an open relationship! I can dig it! I'm hip!"
  • Replacement Scrappy: Tori Scott. She...wasn't very well received, as fans who saw those episodes kept wondering "Where are Kelly and Jessie?" On top of her being a hastily devised replacement character, the blatant attempts to shill her as a character who was able to smugly outwit Zack, triumphantly put Slater in his place, have the uber-popular Lisa literally begging her for friendship, and magically attract Screech away from his Lisa obsession made her come across as a Mary Sue. Also, her actress's poor skills were the icing on the cake.
    • It should be noted that the only reason for the introduction of Tori is that at the last minute NBC ordered more episodes to be filmed for the final season, just as the series was wrapping up and all the cast's contracts had expired. Cast members Elizabeth Berkley and Tiffani Amber-Thiessen (Who played Jessie Spano and Kelly Kapowski, respectively) simply wanted to move on and refused to resign. As a result, the character of Tori was hastily created to fill in the roles left by the absence of the two aforementioned characters, and especially in the case of Kaposwki's absence, serve as a love interest for Zack Morris.
    • The Tori episodes were filmed after the series finale and the made-for-TV movie that were supposed to wrap up the plot of the series, but were inserted into the middle of the season, as their storylines take place at the high school, in the usual canon of the series. This has lead to a series of gigantic plot holes that fans call the "Tori Paradox": Out of nowhere, Jessie and Kelly unexplainably disappear; Tori starts as a new student at the school and instantly befriends the main cast, who are carrying on as if Jessie and Kelly never existed; She is established as some kind of hybrid of Jessie and Kelly, thus she is beautiful and athletic while being smart, snarky and feminist; Zack begins a romantic relationship with her with absolutely no mention of his relationship with Kelly and showing no remorse for the fact that he is potentially cheating on her with Tori; Zack and Tori break up and all of a sudden, she is gone with no explanation of her fate; Jessie and Kelly reappear and everything reverts back to how it was before Tori appeared; Zack and Kelly get married and everyone graduates with no mention of Tori whatsoever, as if she was never there in the first place. This can also be seen as an example of What Happened to the Mouse?.
    • It has been noted that Tori Scott both resembles and shares personality traits (most notably her strong feminist attitude) with singer/pianist Tori Amos, who had come to fame around the time the "Tori" episodes were filmed and aired. However, no evidence exists that the character is based off the singer, and thus any similarities between the two are simply a hilarious coincidence.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Zack and Lisa hooking up and making quite a nice couple and having Screech move on to Jessie, two potentially interesting bits of plot which was completely ignored afterwards. In the episode with Lisa's secret admirer, she meets a person she thinks is Zack at a costume party and announces she loves him. When it turns out to be Screech, the entire plot is dropped forever.
    • Since that last part with the costume party takes place during the bizarre Tori Era, an era that seemed to become Discontinuity as soon as it was over, we can assume that that event was sucked out of continuity and vanished into a time warp like most of the other events that happened during the Tori arc.
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