They love me! They really love me!
Helen, "The Sound of Helen"
Helen is a supporting character in the series Kiff. She is a drama teacher at Table Town Middle School whose students include Kiff Chatterley and Barry Buns, who often find themselves dealing with her crass and self-serving antics in their adventures.
Profile[]
Helen teaching.
Helen is a witch who works as a drama teacher at Table Town Middle School, where her students include Kiff Chatterley and Barry Buns, along with the rest of Miss Deer Teacher's class. Helen lives in an apartment in downtown Table Town, and her relatives include her sister Agnes and her ghostly great-great-great-grandmother. She also has a number of magical companions, including a computer gremlin and a collection of sentient "bad fruits", one of whom is Banana.[4] Helen's egomaniacal personality is almost always on full display, and often gets in the way of her ability to not only teach, but function as an upstanding member of society.
Helen is indicated to be at least 400 years old in "Personal Assistant". In "Big Barry on Campus", when she complains about her faculty ID displaying her age as 712 (which she then has her computer gremlin change to a false age of 217), even her own boss, Principal Secretary, shows uncertainty about exactly how old Helen is. She has resided in downtown Table Town for at least 200 years, and previously lived in another apartment in the 19th century.[5]
Appearance[]
Helen is a tall and slender witch with light green skin and long, light blue hair. She has yellow eyes, pointed ears, a pointed nose, sharp buck teeth protruding from her mouth, and a round torso. For clothing, Helen typically wears a leotard-like black dress, a black witch hat, a brown belt with a gold buckle, and black boots.
Due to her supernatural nature, Helen's body is capable of withstanding great physical harm. Over her lifetime, she has survived numerous instances of being thrown into volcanic holes (which she readily attributes to the fact that she is "not a very well-liked member of society").[6]
Personality[]
Helen in a rage.
Brash and self-absorbed, Helen frequently antagonizes others with her rude and dismissive attitude. Her negative reputation around Table Town is such that she has been consistently rejected for the Table Town Humanitarian of the Year award (and banned from its award ceremony) due to having "never done a single kind thing for anyone", though Helen rejects this characterization as "political".[1] She once took a career test whose results recommended that she "should be kept away from society as a remote lighthouse keeper".[1]
Helen casting a spell.
Being a witch, Helen is capable of all sorts of magic and spells, which can variously prove to be a hindrance or a benefit to those around her. She relies on magic to accomplish nearly everything in her daily life, to the extent that when she temporarily loses her powers in "Arrested Dehelenment" due to her failure to renew her magic license, she is unable to even pour a bowl of cereal.
Helen's inflated sense of self sometimes leads her to manipulate others, including Kiff and Barry, for her own ends, and she is perfectly willing to resort to tactics such as theft, trickery, and blackmail to get her way. Nevertheless, Helen's acquaintances mostly put up with her and perceive her as more of a nuisance than a threat. Indeed, Helen's schemes rarely escalate to anything particularly serious, largely due to her own apathy and laziness. She also has a tendency for baffling displays of gullibility and poor memory, including forgetting the names of her own students, such as Kiff[7] and Trevor Angstrom.[8]
Helen fantasizing about becoming famous.
As a teacher, Helen is prone to belittling her students and sleeping on the job. She has ambitions of one day quitting teaching and making it in the entertainment industry, a conquest that she pursues in her free time, with her own mother as her manager.[9] She manages to impress Roy Fox in an audition in "Pool Party", but later learns that he wants to feature her in a humiliating TV show called Table Town's Cringiest Wannabes. In "Principal Helen", Helen, in an attempt to score a role in the film Hot Principal, gets herself temporarily promoted to acting principal for method acting purposes. As an additional side hustle, she operates Be Dazzled!, a part-time bedazzling business.[10] In "Much Ado About Muffin", she founds Helen's Muffins, a short-lived but successful business that sells healthy muffins, which turn out to actually be disguised cupcakes.
Helen is fond of musical theater and has written several musicals centered around herself, including CinderHelen and The Sound of Helen (posters for which are displayed around her classroom), and the one-woman show Here Comes Helen.[11] In "The Sound of Helen", she manages to blackmail Principal Secretary into funding a school production of The Sound of Helen, only to quit as director when her class criticizes her plotless, self-centered script.
In "Next Year's Musical", Helen is asked to write a script for a second school musical, but struggles with a bad case of writer's block. It later turns out that her own students placed her in a stage replica of her classroom while she was asleep, and that unbeknownst to her, her entire creative struggle was being presented to an audience as a musical about Helen's artistic process, as the students knew she would inevitably turn her struggle into a dramatic scene.
Helen demonstrating her dancing abilities.
Helen is also a highly skilled dancer. She nearly won the position of third alternate on the TV show Dancing on the Tables before losing the spot to Tuft Pierre's Principal Swan due to an unexplained "incident", which Helen remains bitter about.[12] In "Principal Dance Socks", Helen gets her revenge by magically making Principal Secretary mirror her dancing during his dance-off against Principal Swan, leading him and Table Town Middle School to victory.
For at least two centuries,[5] Helen was in a relationship with Centaur Claus. A framed picture of them hangs in Helen's living room, and when the two are first seen together in "Halfway There Day", they blatantly flirt with each other. By "Kiff and Barry Save Halfway There Day", Helen and Centaur Claus have broken up, but she continues to text him and later sends Kiff and Barry to the Equator in order to learn why he has been ghosting her texts.
Relationships[]
Kiff Chatterley and Barry Buns[]
Helen teaming up with Kiff and Barry.
Helen is a recurring presence in Kiff and Barry's adventures, with her selfishness often putting herself at odds with the duo. Her various offenses have included accidentally getting Barry sent to high school;[13] stealing Barry's "confidence hat" to wear it for social media likes;[14] having her brainwashed students bedazzle items for her;[10] making Kiff her personal assistant by magically altering Kiff's career test recommendation;[1] trapping her students in her laptop in order to take the day off to go shopping at Partials;[15] betraying Kiff and Barry on their quest to destroy a powerful magic ring light, in order to take the device for herself;[6] and swapping Kiff and Barry's tails.[16]
Helen watching My Fair Helen.
Nonetheless, Helen has also frequently assisted Kiff and Barry, typically by performing spells for them, and the two are willing to maintain a friendly relationship with Helen despite their frequent conflicts with her. In her debut appearance in "Pool Party", Helen, in exchange for a meeting with Roy Fox, casts a spell at Kiff's request to help Barry swim. However, she undoes the spell when Kiff, trying to prevent Helen from being humiliated on TV, sabotages Helen's shoot with Roy. When Helen later realizes Kiff's good intentions, she musters up enough humility to thank Kiff. The three later team up in "The Five Pigeons of the Acapellapocalypse" to save Table Town from the episode's titular antagonists. In "Two for One Hot Dogs", Helen performs a time reversal spell for Kiff and Barry in exchange for them agreeing to help make "Helen's up" catch on as a catchphrase.
In "The Sound of Helen", Helen's drive to achieve her musical theater dreams inspires Kiff to conceive the idea for the musical My Fair Helen. When Helen eventually watches her class present My Fair Helen, she is touched by the result and later tells Kiff that she has "never felt so close to an employee before".
When Kiff struggles to let out an unsneezed sneeze in "Kiff Has to Sneeze", Helen performs a spell to transport Barry inside Kiff's mind to release the sneeze, doing so because her sunbathing could be affected by Kiff's inflated head blocking out the sun. In "Wiz Ed", Helen works with her students to get their money back from wizard con man Ed. Helen concocts a fake spell at Kiff's request in "Here Comes the Wedding Episode" to convince Mama Berry that a non-existent curse has been lifted. In "So Fluffy", Helen is asked to perform a memory-wiping spell to make Table Town forget an oppressively popular song. In "Love Ed", Helen ropes Kiff and Barry into helping her grocery shop by making it part of their grades, so the duo agree to help Ed woo Helen so he can be saddled with her errands instead. Ed eventually reveals that he was only scamming Helen to steal her magical "Shorts of Doogadu", but Helen, aware of this the entire time, simply summons back the shorts and enjoys herself to Ed's pocketed things.
Due to a Halloween curse sending Kiff and Barry back in time by 200 years in "Ye Olde Candy Shoppe of Horrors", Helen first crossed paths with the duo in the 19th century, long before the two were even born. As she is the only person in the past whom the two know personally, Kiff and Barry seek her assistance in getting back to the present day, and she provides crucial knowledge that helps them undo the aforementioned curse. As another peculiar effect of their time travel, Kiff and Barry end up being responsible for sparking Helen's interest in acting by mentioning the present-day Helen's love of acting.
Principal Secretary[]
Helen and Principal Secretary performing together.
Principal Secretary often finds himself on the receiving end of Helen's misdeeds. She hacks into his laptop to change the age on her school ID in "Big Barry on Campus", while in "The Sound of Helen", she blackmails him into funding The Sound of Helen in exchange for changing his flat tire, which she is later revealed to have caused in the first place. In "Principal Helen", she sends him off on a cruise vacation and fakes a video message from him so that she can be named acting principal while he is away.
Generally, however, the two are fairly cordial with each other. In "Principal Dance Socks", Helen helps Principal Secretary win his dance-off against Principal Swan by magically controlling his legs, though he remains oblivious to her assistance and angers her by failing to credit her for his victory. After another misunderstanding, Helen sabotages his performance on Dancing on the Tables, but they later unite to join Kiff in her musical number on the show. When Principal Secretary's habit of viewing old photos of his ex is publicly exposed in "Ghost Wolf's Art", Helen makes him feel less pathetic by revealing to him that she placed GPS trackers on all her exes. At his request, she performs a cheerleading number to motivate Table Town Middle School during their track meet against Tuft Pierre in "Kiff Is Good at Sports".
Agnes[]
Helen and Agnes arguing.
While Helen and Agnes love each other, they have a difficult relationship due to their completely opposing personalities. In "Farley", Helen takes Barry to get Kristophe's stuffed doll Farley dry cleaned at Agnes' store Wish Wash. When Barry learns that Helen and Agnes are feuding, he offers to counsel them, resulting in a tearful reconciliation between the sisters. By the end of the episode, however, they end up in another disagreement, this time over who loves the other more.
In "I Like to Move It!", Helen is unwilling to visit Agnes' house to claim a free piano because they are once again feuding, so she hires Kiff and Barry to pick up the piano in exchange for a magical wish-granting horseshoe. Later, Helen mentions that the horseshoe has never been used because she and Agnes could never agree on what to wish for.
Appearances[]
| Specials | ||||
| Opening sequence: | Non-speaking | |||
| 1. "The Haunting of Miss McGravy's House": | Appears | 2. "Lore of the Ring Light": | Appears | |
Foreign voice actors[]
| Language | Voice |
|---|---|
 Brazilian Portuguese
|
Maíra Góes |
 Castilian Spanish
|
Amparo Bravo |
 Czech
|
Helena Hanson-Dytrtová |
 Danish
|
Katrine Falkenberg |
 Dutch
|
Ditte Jaspers |
 European Portuguese
|
Ana Cloe |
 French
|
Marie-Laure Dougnac |
 Finnish
|
Raili Raitala |
 Hebrew
|
Tami Barak (תמי ברק) |
 Hungarian
|
Szilvia Réti |
 Italian
|
Cinzia De Carolis |
 Japanese
|
Satomi Arai (新井里美) |
 Latin Spanish
|
Berenice Vega |
 Norwegian
|
Sarah MacDonald Berge |
 Polish
|
Klementyna Umer |
 Romanian
|
Olimpia Mălai |
 Swedish
|
Carla Abrahamsen |
 Taiwanese Mandarin
|
Yang Shih-ying (楊詩穎) |
 Turkish
|
Zeynep Önen |
Trivia[]
- Helen's spells typically involve her taking random objects and creating a corresponding rhyme:
- "Bark of tree, crumbs of knish, make this rabbit swim like a fish."[17]
- "Peel of fruit, reboot."[13]
- "Lint from purse, reverse."[18]
- "Pitted date, take the form of the thing you hate!"[7]
- "Bits of whatever I find, send that Bun into Kiff's mind!"[19]
- "Random junk from bottom drawer, spell 134!"[16]
- "Iced javaccino she was saving for later, send these two children to the Equator!"[20]
- "Lead pipe, memory wipe."[21]
- She drives a hatchback car whose license plate reads "HEXIN".[9]
- She has a seeming interest in frogs; a picture of her holding a frog to her face can be seen in her home by the front door, and in "Personal Assistant" she is seen leaving a product review for a frog toy she had ordered.
- One of her lifelong dreams, in addition to winning the Table Town Humanitarian of the Year award, is "to eat a sculpture of my own face made of Salisbury steak."[1]
- She has her own distinctive theme music, which typically soundtracks at least one of her on-screen appearances in an episode.
Production[]
- An early concept sheet for the series mentions that Helen rubs frog juice on her face to stay "young and mysterious",[22] a character trait that, although not directly incorporated into the series itself, would seemingly be rewritten into a general interest in frogs, as noted above.
Gallery[]
Click here to view the gallery for Helen.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "Personal Assistant".
- ↑ "Principal Helen".
- ↑ First mentioned in "Pool Party".
- ↑ "Rotten Banana".
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Ye Olde Candy Shoppe of Horrors".
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Lore of the Ring Light".
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Weekly Grocery Shop".
- ↑ "Wiz Ed".
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "The Five Pigeons of the Acapellapocalypse".
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Mall Leader".
- ↑ "Farley".
- ↑ "Principal Dance Socks".
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Big Barry on Campus".
- ↑ "Hat".
- ↑ "Kiff Escape!".
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Mystery Spell".
- ↑ "Pool Party".
- ↑ "Two for One Hot Dogs".
- ↑ "Kiff Has to Sneeze".
- ↑ "Kiff and Barry Save Halfway There Day".
- ↑ "So Fluffy".
- ↑ burai1992 (May 5, 2023). Concept Art for "Kiff". Reddit. Retrieved on September 6, 2023.