Edna Krabappel
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| The Simpsons character | |
| |
| Age | 30s |
|---|---|
| Gender | Female |
| Hair Color | Light brown |
| Job | Fourth grade teacher at Springfield Elementary |
| Relatives | None |
| First appearance | Bart the Genius |
| Voice actor | Marcia Wallace |
Edna Krabappel is a fictional character featured in The Simpsons, voiced by Marcia Wallace. She is a middle-aged schoolteacher who has had any idealism she once may have possessed beaten out of her by the sad realities of resource-hungry schools and misbehaving children.
[edit] Profile
Krabappel holds a Master's from Bryn Mawr College, but is thoroughly jaded, a caricature of the American public school system, as evidenced on the occasion when Lisa steals all the teachers' editions of the text books (which contain the answers), and the panicked teachers are unable to teach.
Krabappel teaches Bart Simpson, Milhouse Van Houten, and Martin Prince, among others at Springfield Elementary School.
She is separated from her husband, who ran off with their marriage counselor. She has talked about her ex living somewhere else exotic but in one episode a man at the local gas station, while diagnosing a fault with her car, tastes sugar in the gasoline and states "Your ex-husband strikes again!" As a result, she severely misses male company, and it is occasionally implied that she feels her biological clock ticking. In early episodes, she is shown as very sexually aggressive: in "Flaming Moe's," she tried to pick up both Joey Kramer (Aerosmith's drummer) and Homer Simpson, even after learning he was married. Bart took cruel advantage of her loneliness in "Bart the Lover" by making her believe that her dream man ("played" by Gordie Howe) has responded to her "lonely hearts" ad. However, Bart regretted doing this, confessed to his family and together, they successfully created a romantically diplomatic farewell letter from the false pen pal to allow Edna to feel loved. In later episodes, she develops a secret romance with the school's principal, Seymour Skinner, a relationship that almost made it to the altar. This is one of the exceedingly few cases where Simpsons characters have undergone a personal evolution within the show's history. However, she's also been seen gadding about with Apu, Sideshow Bob, and Comic Book Guy.
In Season 17 ("The Seemingly Never-Ending Story"), it's shown in a flashback that Krabappel was in a serious relationship with Moe Szyslak when she first moved to Springfield, before meeting Skinner or even becoming a teacher. She was about to run away with him (and possibly get married) but then changed her mind when she met Bart, a student she believed needed help. During this flashback, its revealed also that she was once a very hopeful, optimistic and attractive woman (i.e. slimmer figure, characteristic bags under her eyes are missing) who genuinely wanted to help people in need. It would seem that after years of frustration thanks to the school, and Bart in particular, this wore away on a somewhat tragic note-- but due to the show's premise of being "stuck" in time, she is only Bart's teacher for less than one year-- keeping up the show's time-honored tradition of contradicting its own timeline. Despite this, at the end of the episode, it appears that Moe and Edna are a couple once again, much to Skinner's jealousy when he caught them making out on school property. Indeed, Krabappel appears to be the object of many a man's desire, as evident by Sideshow Bob's outrage in one episode wherein his romantic date with her is ruined by a spying Bart: "You only get one chance with Edna Krabappel!"
Her last name is pronounced /krɑ bɑpəl/, a play on the fruit "crabapple." Matt Groening admitted in a commentary on the DVD of the first season that it was meant to be a joke that no one called her "crabapple," and indeed no one did — until the real Seymour Skinner, and then Milhouse, did so.
Homer said during season 8 "Wait a minute. Bart's teacher is named Krabappel? Oh, I've been calling her Crandall. Why didn't someone tell me? Ohhh, I've been making an idiot of myself!" (The joke of course being that Homer sidesteps the "obvious" mispronunciation.) Krabappel's name may be a takeoff of the teacher in The Little Rascals, which featured a teacher named "Miss Crabtree."
It has been implied in one episode that Krabappel wants to quit teaching and go into real estate.
[edit] International Notes
In France, Edna Krabappel is called Krappabel: Kra sounds like "cra-cra" which is used by young children to describe something dirty and ppabel sounds exactly just like "pas belle" (not pretty).
In Italy, she is called Edna Caprapall: Capra in Italian means Goat, and Caprapall recalls the image of a goat.
In Spain, she is called Edna Carapapel: in Spanish it means Paperface.
[edit] Notable Quotes
- "Eh, she's faking it." in Bart's Friend Falls in Love (while watching a sex education film in class)
- "HAH!"
- "Homework: Eat a stick of butter." (written on blackboard in "Nightmare Cafeteria" in Treehouse of Horror V segment in which the faculty eats the students)
- "Relax! This will be one of the few pleasant memories they'll have of life when they're pumping gas for a living." (in a response to a teacher's questioning of the educational value of a yo-yo show in assembly)
- When accepting an award for Teacher of the Year, Edna was surprised after she, "Showed the R-Rated Romeo & Juliet. I thought that nipple would haunt me forever."
