"Hey, hey, hey, what is going on here?" For more than a decade, that cry meant Principal Richard Belding was about to discipline Zack Morris and company, or the Bayside classes that followed them, once again. Dennis Haskins, the Chattanooga-born actor who gave Belding his voice and his exasperation, died on September 27, 2026, in California, at the age of 75.

Belding was the grown-up in charge, one man in a suit holding the line against a hallway full of teenagers. Haskins first played him in 1988 on the Disney Channel's Good Morning, Miss Bliss, opposite Hayley Mills. When NBC relaunched the series as Saved by the Bell in 1989, he stayed for all four seasons alongside Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Mario Lopez, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley, Lark Voorhies and Dustin Diamond. He also carried the principal through two TV movies and Saved by the Bell: The New Class, which ran until 2000. The show began on Saturday mornings and, as he told Our Tennessee, a University of Tennessee publication, eventually reached more than 87 countries. He said he was "proud to have been there from the very first episode to the last."

He had to fight for the part. In a 2009 interview with Daily Actor, Haskins recalled going through seven auditions, making it as far as the network and still losing out. Against everyone's advice, he phoned the executive producer to ask how he had done, a breach of what he called the cardinal rule. The call got him brought back, and eventually hired. When Disney cancelled Miss Bliss, NBC's Brandon Tartikoff bought the rights to four of its characters, Belding among them, and built Saved by the Bell around them with producer Peter Engel.

Long before Bayside, there was Chattanooga. Haskins was born there on November 18, 1950, and came up through Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Notre Dame High School and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he played a year of basketball and seemed to sign up for everything else. According to NewsChannel 9, he reported for the student paper, acted with the Drama Club, helped found the Harlequins theater group and wrote original plays for it. As the student government's entertainment chairman he brought Ike and Tina Turner to campus in 1973, and through the Blue Key honor fraternity he helped run "Freaks vs. Fuzz," a yearly basketball game that raised scholarship money for the children of UTC and Chattanooga police officers.

He left UTC in the 1970s just shy of a degree and went into the music business as a manager, agent and promoter, at one point road-managing Gregg Allman on tour. Acting was the dream he kept circling. "I always wanted to be an actor, but it scared me to try it," he told Daily Actor. An outdoor drama in Louisiana got him his Equity card, and in 1979 he turned up in the very first episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. Guest spots followed on CHiPs, Knots Landing, Magnum, P.I., The Fall Guy and The Twilight Zone.

Bayside eventually handed him a joke that doubled as a homecoming: in one of the franchise's farewell episodes, the writers sent Belding off to become dean of students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. After The New Class ended, Haskins kept working, with appearances on The West Wing, The Practice, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, Hot in Cleveland and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and a part in the 2014 film A Million Ways to Die in the West. In February 2015 he played Belding one more time, in a Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon sketch with Gosselaar, Berkley, Lopez and Thiessen, and in 2017 he appeared in music videos for Dirty Heads' "Vacation" and Khalid's "Young Dumb & Broke."

He saw the people who stopped to greet him as the reason he had a career. "If they weren't saying hello to me, excited to meet me, I would not have had a job for 11 years," he said in 2009. He traveled with the USO in 2000 to troops in Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia, and again in 2002 to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Oman and Kyrgyzstan, The Hollywood Reporter noted. Closer to home he became such a fixture at Dimples, a karaoke bar in Burbank, that plenty of patrons assumed he owned it. In its tribute, the bar remembered him singing for the room, meeting fans, posing for their selfies and treating the place as a second home. Jay Schachter, his agent and friend of more than 20 years, said: "He was a great person, and he loved, I mean absolutely LOVED his fans. He always had time for them, no matter what."

His hometown kept claiming him, and UTC honored him as a distinguished alumnus in 2000. A regional high school academic decathlon, the Dennis Haskins Open, was also named for him. Still, he said, there had "always been something missing for me." As he explained in a UTC announcement, "For reasons long past, I left just short of my liberal arts degree in theater." On December 12, 2015, at 65, he put on a cap and gown at McKenzie Arena and received a bachelor's degree in theatre, one he had earned in full rather than an honorary one. "It's official! Tassel moved from right to left! I'm a graduate!" he wrote on Instagram that day.

Around the same time he gave the UTC Library his personal working scripts from Good Morning, Miss Bliss and Saved by the Bell, filled with the notes he made for each episode, along with a suit he wore as Belding. The library opened an exhibit of the collection in the spring of 2016. "It was so hard for me to let go of these scripts because these are my scripts," he said at the time.

He is survived by his son.

What he leaves is unusually concrete. There are the Bayside episodes, the show of a generation, as he once called it. There is the principal's paperwork, filed at the real university that shaped the man who played him: script drafts, filming schedules and scene outlines from 1988 to 1992, kept in UTC's special collections alongside Belding's suit. And in the city where he wrote plays for the Harlequins and raised scholarship money with a charity basketball game, there is the theatre degree he went back to finish at 65, the one thing he said had always been missing.