Trivia / ENA

• Acting for Two:
  • Lizzie Freeman plays both Moony and Sad ENA.
  • Alejandro Fletes plays both the Auctioneer and the Headtombs in "Auction Day".
  • Sam Meza plays both Rubik and Drunk ENA in "Extinction Party."
  • Hanai Chihaya plays both Robert in "Extinction Party" and Gabo in "Temptation Stairway."
• Approval of God: Joel Guerra retweets fan art often.
• Corpsing: Merchant (voiced by Sr. Pelo) breaks into laughter after chanting "TURRON!" for a bit too long.
• Crossdressing Voices:
  • Happy ENA is voiced by Marc Rafanan (in "Auction Day"), who is male, Gabe Velez (in "Extinction Party" and "Temptation Stairway"), who is transgender/genderfluid and uses they/them, he/him, and she/her pronouns, and Griffin Puatu (in "Power of Potluck"), who is male.
  • Salesperson ENA is voiced in Dream BBQ by Aleks Le, who is male.
• Defictionalization: The first season imitated the FMVs of weird 90s CD-ROM adventure games, especially the Japanese ones, and all but the first also imitated those that dared to have low-quality live-3D gameplay. The second season goes all the way by actually BEING a game.
• Inspiration for the Work: The description of "ENA" (the animation test) says that ENA's design was inspired by "Girl Before A Mirror" by Pablo Picasso and the art of Romero Britto. You can definitely see a resemblance to both of these when you compare.
• The Other Darrin: Happy ENA has had three different VAs over the course of the series due to the first two VAs being subject to a Role-Ending Misdemeanor.
  • In "Auction Day," Happy ENA is voiced by Marc Rafanan. The role was recast with Gabe Velez in "Extinction Party" and "Temptation Stairway".
  • Griffin Puatu replaced Velez as the voice of Happy ENA for "Power of Potluck".
• Playing Against Type: Sr. Pelo guest stars in "Temptation Stairway" as the Merchant, who is quite soft-spoken, at least until he gives ENA the turrón. In his normal videos, he is quite well known for using the opposite tone of voice.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • Marc Rafanan lost his role as Happy ENA after being accused of grooming a minor shortly after the release of "Auction Day."
  • His replacement, Gabe Velez, would also meet a similar fate after he was accused of raping his then girlfriend, meaning Happy ENA was recast with Griffin Puatu for "Power of Potluck".
• Schedule Slip: As stated in the comments section of the game's second trailer, Dream BBQ was originally meant to release in December 2022, but was initially pushed back to an unspecified point in 2023 due to the development team's ambitions for the project getting too big for it to be finished in time. It would later be pushed back into 2024, though in this time, Joel G created and released another ENA "season 1" episode called "Power of Potluck to compensate and tide fans over.
• Sequel in Another Medium: The "season 1" is a Web Animation series, but Dream BBQ is a fully-interactive Adventure Game.

---

Other trivia:

• Several people noticed the similarity between ENA and the characters from this Soviet animated short from 1969, "Absent-minded Giovanni," apparently set in a surreal version of Italy.

---