‘The Simpsons’ pays tribute to Marcia Wallace with Bart Simpson opening
A little over a week after the death of Marcia Wallace, the show that called her a part of its family for decades in “The Simpsons” gave a brief tribute to her in its opening credits. During the classic Bart Simpson – chalkboard opening, you saw the following to the left rather than some sort of silly series of commands that Bart was writing out time and time again.
Even before this new episode even aired, Fox decided that for an extra tribute, they would air the 2011 episode “The Ned-Liest Catch,” where Wallace’s teacher character of Edna Krabappel started dating the widowed Ned Flanders. The idea was of course to give her a moment by highlighting one of her more-recent episodes that featured her in a prominent role. The original plan was to actually air the “Bart the Lover” episode from more than 20 years ago, which was the episode that won Wallace an Emmy, but this was changed up later.
There are going to be still more appearances from Wallace and the Mrs. Krabappel character on the show throughout season 25, as voice work happens many months in advance thanks to the lengthy time it takes to animate this show. The production window for “The Simpsons” is significantly longer than almost any other on TV, and you should be covered for the better part of this season. Eventually, the plan here still is to retire the Edna character, and bring in a different teacher personality in the future voiced by someone else. She was never the character that the show was planning to kill off, and this is still supposedly going to happen at some point before the end of season 26.
As executive producer Al Jean recently noted, there was some sort of significant story for this Edna character that the team was working on prior to her death, but that will need to be changed now. At the end of the day, we are just pleased that despite being a show that tends to make its bread and butter with silliness, there is so much heart on “The Simpsons” behind the scenes and love for those who appear on it.
Photo: Fox