How “I’m So Excited” Became the Most Ridiculous—and Iconic—‘Saved by the Bell’ Moment

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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/11...history-reboot

A fledgling Bayside girl group. Caffeine pills. A breakdown. “Jessie’s Song” is more than another episode of the teen classic—it’s a pop cultural phenomenon. Ahead of the ‘Saved by the Bell’ reboot, the cast and crew behind the scene recall how it came to be.



Time out. It’s not like Elizabeth Berkley didn’t enjoy filming the Saved by the Bell episode in which Screech secretly records a slumber party to find out Kelly’s true feelings about Zack. And she was fine with all the girls crushing on a cute substitute teacher at Bayside High School. But then she read the script for an episode titled “Jessie’s Song.” She knew instantly this one would be different. And she became very, very ... excited.

“We were going to explore something different on a Saturday morning show and we were going to go deep,” she recalls. “As a young actress, I was finally going to have something juicy. All the others felt the same way. Like, oh wow, we were going to really act this week. It’s not just who’s going to ask who to the dance.”

What she didn’t realize was that “Jessie’s Song”—in which her character, overachiever Jessie Spano, develops an addiction to caffeine pills to keep pace with her hectic schedule—would not only be the series’ signature episode, it would remain seeped into our collective pop-culture consciousness a full 30 years later. And just to be clear, this is not some you-had-to-be-there touchstone in Gen X history. Even if you never watched a single installment of Saved by the Bell when it aired Saturday mornings on NBC from 1989 to 1992, you know the moment. You know that Jessie ends up melting down in her bedroom in front of her friend Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and yelping a mangled lyric from the chorus of a Pointer Sisters smash. Do I even have to say it? Aren’t you picturing “I’m so exciiiited, I’m so exciiiited, I’m so (gulp) scared!” right now?!

But the popularity of “Jessie’s Song” expands far beyond the concept of a harmless teen comedy pulling a Very Special Episode. In a ridiculously jam-packed span of 22 minutes, Zack persuades Jessie and her friends Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) and Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies) to form a singing girl group; Samuel “Screech” Powers (Dustin Diamond) dresses in drag to record the girls singing in the locker room to covertly use as a makeshift demo; said group, now named Hot Sundae, films a low-rent music video to impress a record producer friend of Zack’s dad; A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez) helps Jessie study for a geometry test and implores her to stop taking the pills; Zack and Slater fight over whether Jessie has a problem; and Jessie breaks down then finally admits that she does have a problem. “The night we shot it, I knew it would hit a nerve,” says Peter Engel, the 84-year-old TV executive who developed Saved by the Bell and cowrote the episode. “The response from the actors and the audience was unbelievable.”

Though Jessie’s dependency issues were presumably resolved by the next episode—“we had nowhere to go with it and we wanted to get back to the comedy,” Engel says—the legend lives on. In the form of GIFs and kitschy T-shirts and musicals, for starters. When a teaser for the brand-new Saved by the Bell series on Peacock was unveiled in August, viewers saw a middle-aged Jessie, now a Bayside guidance counselor, slap a bottle of caffeine pills out of a student’s hand and warn them of its dangerous effects. “I feel like we mentioned caffeine pills like maybe a dozen times throughout the first episode,” says writer and co-executive producer Tracey Wigfield of the series, which premieres November 25. “We wrote it for people who grew up watching the show who are more mature now and wanted something edgier. I wanted to poke fun at it a little.”

And just to bring it all home to 2020, the three-decades-old episode even applied to Election Day. “I don’t know if you saw my recent Instagram post, but it’s perfect for us,” Berkley mentions about 30 seconds into our phone call. “It’s a clip from the very thing we’re about to talk about because we’re all Jessie Spano on Election Day and so excited yet so scared.” The 10-second video has been viewed almost 100,000 times.

[JO Sweet Heart]

To me, that is the best episode.

God bless you always!!!

Holly

P.S. I love when her experience is re-visited when the kids were to film the anti drug commercial later on in the series.