Gaze deep into the opening sequence of Saved by the Bell -- a chaotic paraverse of clashing pastels, stray squiggles, unmanned skateboards, and plastic flamingoes streaking past like so much ‘90s space trash -- and it’s like a metaphor for the experience of watching the show itself. So pure, total, and overwhelming were the cheery, chummy, good-time vibes at Bayside that it amounted to something like a crushing, unforgiving vacuum of cultural space. Nothing from our world could survive the journey into its swirling vortex of stonewashed suck, and, once there, surely, nothing could ever escape.

Or so we thought. Though its run was short and sweet (1989 -1993) and its doomed empire of spinoffs short-lived (The College Years, The New Class, we hardly knew ye), Saved by the Bell has maintained a persistent presence in the now-grizzled Gen-Y consciousness. And no single utterance from the show has stuck harder than this one:

“I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so... SCARED!”

On November 3rd, it will be 25 years since “Jessie’s Song,” since Jessie Myrtle Spano fatefully dismissed the warnings of her sexist suitor and devoted tutor A.C. Slater, experimented with a potentially lethal combination of caffeine pills, geometry, and high-energy aerobic dance, and channeled the Pointer Sisters as she melted down into the arms of Zack Morris. Never forget.

Not that you stand a chance of forgetting. Jessie’s now-legendary freakout left deep scratch marks down the walls of our pop culture memory. Most recently, we’ve seen her teenage trauma reprised in 2013 on Dancing With the Stars, when actress Elizabeth Berkley warmed up for her routine by overdosing on “Jive Pills.” Two years later, Jimmy Fallon inserted himself into a slightly wrinkly reunion of the Bayside crew for The Tonight Show, a scene that climaxed with the cast egging Berkley into one more unhinged Pointer Sisters paroxysm.