Edna Krabappel

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The Simpsons character

Edna Krabappel
Age	37
Gender	Female
Hair color	Light brown
Job	Fourth grade teacher at Springfield Elementary
Relatives	an ex-husband
First appearance	Bart the Genius
Voice actor	Marcia Wallace

Ms. Edna Krabappel (a.k.a. Mrs. K) is a teacher at Springfield Elementary School in The Simpsons, voiced by Marcia Wallace.

[edit] Profile

Edna 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 textbooks (which contain the answers), and the panicked teachers are unable to teach.

She is divorced; her husband 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. In One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish she has a hot encounter with a Japanese cook on the backseat of her car. 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.

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 /krɑˈbɑpəl/, a play on the fruit "crabapple". It is also a reference to the teacher Miss Crabtree from the 1930's The Little Rascals serials^[1].

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.)

[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.