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There are a lot of ways to give characters on TV depth and personality. One way is by establishing what kind of music they listen to. Sometimes this is done well, and it makes sense for the character. Take, for example, Clarissa Darling’s affinity for They Might Be Giants. That just tracks. Ben Wyatt loving Letters from Cleo? A clever pull, and perfectly sensible. On the other hand, on occasion, it feels very clumsy or tacked on. Sometimes a musician appears on a show, and now everybody has to be fans of said musician. Other times, a character’s fandom is seemingly limited to posters tossed up on a bedroom wall. Even if this is the case, it becomes canonical. In theory, these characters are fans of the musicians plastered upon their wall.
We are going to explore this phenomenon by drilling down into one specific show, the paragon of ‘90s culture that is Saved by the Bell. Nobody can accuse Saved by the Bell, or its creators, of putting a lot of thought and effort into such details. But the show does suggest that its characters are fans of certain musicians. Does it work logically, though? In short, would the characters of Saved by the Bell be fans of these particular bands?
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Um…Lisa Turtle did go through a Tina Turner phase as I remember correctly. Zack found her wig in the episode where her father lost his job.
I also remember an episode where Lisa mentions how attractive she thought Michael Jackson was.
If that “wizard” you mention is the poster in the screencap, then you should feel terrible bc that is a poster of Einstein, who could probably be defined as a wizard, but wasn’t just some wizard to not be mentioned by name.
Also, my wife, who was in elementary school in the early 90s, apparently loved U2….so they may “feel” like an adult band, but it seems they were loved by many age groups.
So it is. In the episode “Beauty and the Screech,” Screech clearly has a poster of Einstein on his wall that we see a few times. However, I was using the episode “Miss Bayside” in my analysis. That is where the picture above comes from. You never get a clear look at his face in that episode. However, upon another viewing, I did realize that the top of the poster does have “E=MC2” on it, so yeah, that’s Einstein too. Still, look at that picture, and tell me it doesn’t scream “wizard” to you.
And when Zack was principal for a day he put up a poster of LL Cool J. This is an incomplete history. It is a task that will never truly be finished.
Lads from Liverpool? U2 is from Dublin.
Rowles’d via Morgan
“U2 are an Irish rock band from Dublin.”
Literally the first sentence on the Wikipedia article.
totally forgot Lisa played bass. Eric Cartman proves to be correct yet again.
I never knew that Albert Einstein was a wizard….The more you know