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(More customer reviews)What young person can't remember spending their Saturday mornings watching the adventures of Zack and company at Bayside High on NBC's "Saved By The Bell"? Those who cannot perhaps have fond memories of watching the show in its popular syndicated airings on TBS. It's tough to stumble across anyone between the ages of 15 and 30 who hasn't seen most episodes and many more than once. If you're reading this, chances are you too remember the fun adventures high school provided for Zack, Slater, Screech, Kelly, Jessie, Lisa and their principal Mr. Belding in this excellent late '80s/early '90s sitcom.
With TV series as popular as they now are on DVD, and with this show relegated to early morning and lunch hour airings (inconvenient for most), what better time to release the first two seasons of "Saved By The Bell" to DVD?
This 5-disc set from Lions Gate Entertainment contains the first 33 episodes of "Saved By The Bell." The season that preceded the years at Bayside - "Good Morning Miss Bliss" (sometimes referred to as "Saved By The Bell: The Junior High Years" on TBS) - is unfortunately NOT included here. That series, which made its debut on The Disney Channel in 1988 and ran for 13 episodes, will hopefully be released at some point in the future. In addition to star Hayley Mills in the title role, the series featured four "SBTB" regulars. Although it differed in tone from the series that became such a hit and revolutionized the Saturday morning lineup, it is quite enjoyable in its own right, and very much deserves to be released to DVD.
The 33 episodes that are included are arranged by airdate, not production order, which essentially means you should watch the episode "King of the Hill" (which is on Disc 3) first - it's the pilot of this series and is about the first day of school when Zack meets Slater). Other than that, there aren't any noticeable continuity issues watching the episodes the way they are arranged.
Some of my favorite episodes in this set:
"The Gift" (Screech is struck by lightning and can see the future),
"Rent-a-Pop" (Zack gets James the actor/waiter to impersonate his father so he can go on a ski trip),
"Aloha, Slater" (Zack convinces the gang that Slater is dying so he'll move to Hawaii),
"Save the Max" (The old Bayside radio station is rediscovered and put to use),
"Running Zack" (Zack actually does research for a school assignment)
I do have a few minor quibbles. Even though there is space in the package for a booklet, there is none - so, there are no descriptions of the episodes, which might make it challenging for those who don't know all the episodes by title alone. Speaking of the package, be careful when peeling the sticker off the top. For some reason, it was placed right on top of the cardboard box instead of the plastic wrapping, so unless you're skillful (or some have suggested, have a hair dryer handy to heat the sticker), you're liable to take off some of the top of the front cover off when opening.
Another minor annoyance is that there are no chapter stops within the episodes, so you'll have to scan to get to a specific scene. It would have been nice (and easy) for chapter stops to have been included where commercial breaks would be, a practice common with most other studios.
Video quality is mostly fine, but a few of the earliest-produced episodes look worse than they probably should - lacking the sharpness of broadcast quality. The overwhelming majority looks okay, but they won't blow you away or anything. (It's probably unreasonable to expect they would.) Audio quality is also less-than-perfect (the volume level sometimes seems inconsistent), but listening at a reasonable volume, this is a non-issue.
As for supplemental material, this set gets a zero. As others have stated in their comments, the show certainly has potential for some nice bonus features. Naturally, I don't expect a 2-hour making-of documentary, but there are little things that would have been nice to include. Like the cast's other NBC TV appearances, or even NBC's "The More You Know" sequences featuring the cast members that every major teen idol seems to have done at one point. There is the strong "E! True Hollywood Story" special that aired last December, which would be nice to include.
And chances are, some of the cast would participate in DVD bonus features, had they been approached, which they were not according to Mario Lopez. (Dustin Diamond, Dennis Haskins, and Peter Engel partook in interviews for the E! special; surely, they would have been interested in contributing to the DVDs.)
I look forward to DVD releases for the rest of the show, plus the one-season runs of "Good Morning, Miss Bliss" and "The College Years", and the two made-for-television movies. Hopefully, some improvements will be made, and we'll see more "Saved By The Bell" DVDs released shortly, and with bonus features.
Still, in spite of these quibbles, I still give this box set 5 stars because of the show itself. Almost of the episodes are excellent, as the deal with real issues that affect high schoolers in a skewed-for-comedy fashion. The show never really took things too seriously and when it did (for instance, Jessie's now-famous struggle with caffeine pills or the Season 4 opener in which Zack and Slater went fisticuffs), it provided even more laughs. "Saved By The Bell" is a one-of-a-kind sitcom and remains extremely funny over a decade later. If only high school really was like Bayside.
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SAVED BY THE BELL:SEASONS 1 & 2 - DVD Movie
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