Earlier this year, Peacock’s Saved By The Bell reboot was renewed for a second season and it’s expected to see the return of some Bayside favorites including Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani Thiessen), AC Slater (Mario Lopez), and Jesse Spano (Elizabeth Berkley). All of the aforementioned stars were present for the first season, which also featured a cameo from Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies). However, one Saved by the Bell staple who did not appear in the new show was Samuel “Screech” Powers, the lovable nerd played by Dustin Diamond in the original series. Sadly, Diamond passed away earlier this year after a short battle with stage IV small-cell Carcinoma. During a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Mario Lopez revealed that the series is working on a “special” tribute for Diamond.
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“We’re planning something special we haven’t gotten into yet,” Lopez shared. “We’re going to have our first table read in about a week or so, but we are planning some special,” he added. “We’re ready to start up again in June and I will be in all those episodes.”
Despite missing out on the show’s first season, the series did provide an update on Screech. “Screech is so lucky he and Kevin get to live on the International Space Station so he doesn’t have to deal with all this,” Slater reveals in an episode. Kevin was the robot Screech built himself in the original series. Interestingly, TMZ recently reported that Diamond was planning on making a series of commercials featuring Kevin.
Saved by the Bell fans were hoping Diamond would appear on the reboot eventually, and some of the show’s star’s hinted that it could have been a possibility before he passed. “We would love for him to come back on set,” Voorhies told Toronto’s KiSS 92.5.
“See I was one of the people in every episode. I was literally in every episode. Out of all of the cast members, I was in the most. And that’s not the case anymore. I’m not in the new one. And how do you have ‘Saved By The Bell’ without Screech?” Diamond told TMZ last year. “It seems like there a missed opportunity. It’s kind of — what’s the old saying about cutting off the finger to spite the hand? Or cutting off the nose to spite the face? Something like that. Ten years in high school, I should know this [laughs] I should have studied it thoroughly.”
What are you hoping to see in Saved by the Bell‘s upcoming tribute to Dustin Diamond? Tell us in the comments.
