“In college, our free time was spent making these movies. So we made one of these movies like a real serious documentary series talking about the most dumb stuff. One of the things was about finding old characters from TV shows and one of those characters was Rod Belding from Saved by the Bell. He had the smallest part, like one episode, but we made it into this huge ordeal like it made it look like he affected these kids lives, and we put it online, and we just we shot that like one day, like during Christmas break, we put it online. And then we checked back a month later and it went viral and got like 1000s of views in just a couple of hours. What happened was Sports Illustrated picked it up, and then it just kind of just took off online from there. We actually tracked down the actor Rod Belding, and he’s out in LA. He’s actually in real estate now, and we sent it to him, and he just responded in one email saying, ‘This was great, let’s do a sequel.'”
“So there we spent the next year, writing like a script with him back and forth, we sent him a draft and he didn’t like that first draft and now looking back at it we didn’t either it was terrible, you know. So we spent a year writing a script one back and forth, and then you finally got it where we liked it. You’re like alright, let’s go out there so we went out there, me and my brothers and about five of our closest friends. We shot it, it was crazy days like 20 hour days where we just had three days to get it all. And so we just shot as much as we could all around LA. We shot it and we stayed at his house. So yeah, it was fun, and we basically recreated the whole episode, but like an updated version. So these kids come out there, they think he’s real and he’s not but he kind of plays into that, and we end up step by step the whole episode happens again like history repeats itself kind of thing. Our first time in LA we and this is like 10 years ago, we were out there just running around with cameras, we didn’t get permits or anything, we just kind of just shot randomly, you know. We’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Yeah, I mean, what’s the worst thing to do so you get out of here. Fine sorry we’re, we’ll take off so we did that together for months to put it together, we had a cover happy with and then put it online and it blew up again and got on all these viral sites back in 2010. And we eventually had to take it down five years later, because back in the day we would use music that wasn’t ours. Yeah, there was, it’s kind of the wild west of online videos. We’re like oh, we’ll use a Coldplay song or something. The funny thing is the one that took us down was a random Indie artist, so we had to pay him 500 bucks, just to get the song, like I’ll take it down so, but we’re getting it back up. So yeah, we’re gonna re edit it.”
– Matt Hamilton
Click here to view the trailer for Saved by the Belding.
