Edna Krabappel
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Edna Krabappel is a fictional character featured in The Simpsons, voiced by Marcia Wallace. She is a stereotypical "downtrodden 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. She 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.
Edna teaches Bart Simpson, Milhouse Van Houten, and Martin Prince, among others at Springfield Elementary School.
Edna 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 diagonsing a fault with her car, tastes sugar in the petrol 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 the drummer from Aerosmith 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. In later episodes, she develops a secret romance with the mother-dominated Seymour Skinner, which 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 Edna 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 Simpson, a student she believed needed help. During this flashback, its revealed also that Edna was once a very hopeful, optimistic woman 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. Despite this, at the end of the episode, it appears that Moe and Edna are a couple once again, much to Seymour Skinner's jealousy when he caught them making out on school property. Indeed, Krabappel appears to be the object of many a male'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!" Krabappel's name may be a takeoff of the teacher in another child-based series, The Little Rascals, which featured a teacher named "Miss Crabtree."
It has been implied in one episode that Edna wants to quit teaching and go into real estate.
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 just like "pas belle" (not pretty)In Italy, Edna is called Edna Caprapall: Capra in Italian means Goat, and Caprapall recalls the image of a goat.
In Spain, Edna is called Edna Carapapel: in Spanish it means Paperface.
Notable Quotes
- "Eh, she's faking it." (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)
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