Who's that Ana? Now we know!

I meant to leave any new posts for that long-awaited (long long long long looooong-awaited) new Encyclopedia excerpt, but this news is just too cool not to give an update on:

The girl who played Ana in the famous MOTHER TV commercial has been identified in this Reddit post!

Reddit user u/No_Kaleidoscope_4359 gives us this info:

I am not very familiar with this game, but a kind redditor helped me find this lost ad my mom has talked about for years. My mom was a model in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s while my grandfather served in the US Navy. She always told me about one of her favorite projects, and advertisement where she got to fight a giant robot. I was so excited to come across more of the digital media from this project!

My mom also did some projects with Sega Genesis, and a few other things with Nintendo that I'm trying to find. Her name, at the time, was Laurel Dollahon. If anybody has any more pictures from production or anything like that, let me know! She would be tickled to see them!

She doesn't remember who the other two kids were, but this was an unexpected and very pleasant surprise, especially to learn how fond she must be of the memory of working on the MOTHER commercial, if she's talked about it so much for years!

Feet of Clay

Alright, so... I made a mistake in the Enemy Characters translation, and (whoops) it's a pretty big error that's thrown some folks in the MOTHER/EarthBound fandom into a state of confusion. I should address it here, as its own post, so consider this something of a press conference (or a public apology, take your pick).

At the very end of the section is a short bio for Tottori, the man who created the clay figures for the game. Yes, clay figures, not papier-mâché as I mistranslated. Cat Blackard of the MOTHER, She Wrote podcast had been speaking to Camille Young (known for her incredible clay sculpture work), who was reportedly confused when the former mentioned the official figures as made of papier-mâché, quoting my translation. Apparently it's impossible to get papier-mâché to look that smooth (I wondered about that too, but as this isn't my area of art, I'd just assumed a professional could work wonders with such material).

It gets even more embarrassing. The kanji used here in the Encyclopedia (紙粘土) is pronounced kami-nendo, and speaking as one who played MOTHER 3 in Japanese at release (long before the fan translation even came out), I should have remembered -- nendo means "clay". Specifically, 紙粘土 is paper clay. How it escaped me to look this up on the Japanese Wikipedia in the first place boggles the mind.

I won't make any excuses. I knew how important this information would be to the MOTHER community, and I distinctly remember looking up the word's definition more than once just to be sure... but oddly enough I must not have Googled it or anything.

So... yeah. Sorry for all the confusion, everyone!

(This is what I get for not branching out into other forms of art than drawing.)