Why NBC's Teenage Romp "Saved by the Bell" Ruined my High School Experience

As a young boy watching Saturday morning cartoons in the early nineties, I inevitably fell under the siren song that is the misadventures of the gang from Bayside. I developed a romantic fantasy of what my impending high school career would be like based on what Zach, Kelly, A.C., Jesse, Lisa, and Screech got up to in each episode. Fast forward to today where I am a jaded university student who is still trying to bounce back from the reality of that ordeal: It’s all bullshit. Growing up in Southern Ontario, my high school career held no similarities to that of a school in Pacific Palisades. Plagued by this misconception for many years now, I have spent many hours meditating on where it exactly all went wrong. What follows is a list of reasons of why life at Bayside is a pipedream. Oh, and fuck Zach Morris.

Be you freshman or senior, you can never freeze time and space so that you can evaluate your situation or simply make a witty comment to no one in particular. You’re not God or Hiro from Heroes, you cannot stop time! Also, there is not some unspoken code of etiquette that high school students follow so that when someone says “time out!” they politely stand still like mannequins. If anything, it will make people think you’re weird and probably make you less popular than you already are since you think saying “time out!” is cool. It’s not even a clever slang, so give it up.

Okay, so before you criticize this statement, let me clarify. High school was a good source ofmusically talented and aspired people but not everyone could sing like birds. Yet at Bayside, Zach and his cronies could all sing and play instruments like experienced musicians and never attended one music class. Except for the one episode when the gang joined the glee club and all the “budding musicians” forgot how to sing properly like the hapless bastards they are, there were many instances of when Bayside students became successful in rock bands, girl pop groups, 1950s-style quintets, and dance competition. I was never privy to such phenomena but I like to think I could be more creative and less selfish in thinking up better band names than “ZackAttack”.

My highschool principal was a nice guy, I guess. I mean I think we established a pretty good relationship from our interaction during school assemblies (he was on stage, I was in the back rows but there was definitely a moment). I never saw the interior of his office since I wasn’t a bad seed and I never felt the urge to give him a clever nickname. His first name was Rudy so I guess “Rudmeister” may have worked but it would have been cleverer if he had been German. I was never the thorn in his side when it came to who ruled the school or showing up the rival school. I never was put in the situation where I had to care for the principal’s new-born son in hopes to impress the head cheer-leader and almost lose the baby in a series of wacky events that ultimately work themselves out in the end.

I’ll say it: I had acne. I’m not embarrassed. I had acne. My friends had acne. My enemies had acne. The girl I had a crush on had acne. The popular kids had acne. The geeks had lots of acne. Even my P.E. teacher had a blemish on his upper lip, but I don’t think that was acne related. Those Californian shit-bags never had to deal with blackheads the entire run of the show aside from the occasional clever “zit pun” and that one episode where Zach creates an acne cream that cured people’s skin but also turned their faces maroon. A move like that would have sent me into high school pariah- hood but all it cost Zach was the torture of a few more episodes of watching Slater give it to Kelly Kapowski. Take that, preppie!

Real lockers are for storing your books and jacket, not a place for your nerd sidekick to spy on your rival or current crush. Being shoved into a locker is never fun. There isn’t some complex system of interlocking tunnels that allows you to exit out of another locker like a bad Scooby-Doo episode. I repeat: being shoved into a locker is never fun. It’s physical harassment. It’s like being buried alive in a coffin except when people come to visit, they laugh instead of mourn.

Like the lockers, dressing up your geek comrade as a cleaning woman or the homely-looking new girl is not a good way to spy on people. If anything sending your friend into the girl’s locker room will never turn out well because those bitches are always fully changed (I think they wore there gym clothes under their normal attire to avoid showing any skin in close quarters). Forays like that clearly have negative effects on your friend’s sexuality, hence Dustin Diamond’s career in pornography and use of the “Dirty Sanchez”. When the friend wasn’t available, using the unemployed actor to pose as your Dad was unrealistic. That guy doesn’t exist. There would be no way a deal like that could work unless a payment of a fifth of whisky or drugs were involved.

-There was no burger joint on campusthat catered only to students

-There was no oil under the football field and/or no one befriended a duck

-No one had an uncle who had a failing Hawaiian resort that could only be saved by me and my friends

-No b-listed actor came to my school to talk about drugs and hypocritically try to get the cheerleader stoned (the jocks did that)

-No one was able to pick radio signals off of new fillings

-I never knew a black person who talked like Lisa Turtle

-I was never able to rig the lockers to hide a fashion show from the principal

-The teachers/principal were not easily fooled into falling for ill-planned schemes

-Our sports teams always lost