Across four seasons of Saved By The Bell—and seven more of Saved By The Bell: The New Class—the one constant was Dennis Haskins, whose harried, yet happy-go-lucky principal, Mr. Belding, served as both constant foil and oddly involved friend to Zack, Kelly, Screech, Lisa, Jesse, Slater, and the insignificant rest of the teens of Bayside High. Haskins first joined the Saturday morning show turned syndication mainstay when it was still the Disney Channel’s Good Morning, Miss Bliss, way back in 1989. He was also the sole adult character to survive its transition to NBC, where it would quickly become a cultural phenomenon among ’90s kids who, even now, remember far more silly details about it than they would like to admit. But what about Haskins? Did he learn anything after all those years in fake school? To find out, The A.V. Club met him at Saved By The Max, Chicago’s popular pop-up recreation of Bayside’s favorite diner, where we subjected him to a barrage of Saved By The Bell trivia questions to determine, once and for all, if Mr. Belding knows what’s going on here.
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