Okay. So several weeks back, we had Girly 80s Cartoon Night, right? We watched the He-Man and She-Ra movie, The Little Mermaid, Transformers (okay, a little less girly), and among other things, Rainbow Brite and The Star Stealer, which I actually went out and bought on DVD. And while watching it for the first time in a few years, I noticed something (I mean something aside from the fact that after all these years, I still feel compelled to sing along to the song at the beginning, and worse yet, I remember all the lyrics) that has been driving me insane since.

So I did what any sane person would do. I popped the DVD into Poddy, did screencaps, and went looking on the Internet.





And then...





The Color Kids. There are, obviously, seven Color Kids, one for each colour (you would not believe how annoyed I was getting at crappy search results until I remembered they were probably spelling "colour" WRONG), like in the song; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Let me name them off, right to left, for those of you who, unlike me (and calantha42 and possibly crantz), didn't watch this movie nine hundred and sixty-five thousand times until the tape wore out. It goes: Canary Yellow, Patty O'Green, Buddy Blue, Shy Violet, Indigo, Lala Orange, Red Butler, and... wait a minute. Who the hell is that kid with the pigtails?

She doesn't fit into the rainbow, really. To be completely fair, I only remember bits and pieces of the "series," but calantha42 and I recently downloaded and watched the first two episodes, so I'm really, really sure there's only *supposed* to be seven Color Kids. And furthermore, if she was there all the time, I have no memory of her at all.

Mucking about on the Internet reveals that her name is Tickled Pink, that she probably has a Sprite named Dee Lite, and that I may be the only one with a big pink hole in my 80s cartoon memory.

I did remember, though, that there was a mysterious and completely random baby:



...apparently later called Baby Brite, who I remember vaguely from colouring books (who in the first two episodes, by the way, turned into an amorphous ball of light and then created Rainbowland) in the first two episodes, who happened to have pink hair (I was also reminded, weirdly, that the same episodes revealed that Rainbow Brite actually had a name before she became Rainbow Brite - Wisp, if you were curious - and that Rainbow Brite is, in fact, an ALIEN).

So I went looking, and found this: http://www.rainbowbrite.net/fiction/

...which made me sit back and gape a little, because the bits about who's a couple and who isn't? Is going a bit far, even for fandom.

Moving on. The main questions, I suppose, are:

1. Who the hell is Tickled Pink, and why does a non-rainbow colour get to be a Color Kid, anyway?
2. If she *is* the ball of light/baby from the first episodes, then why the hell has she grown up while the other Color Kids have remained perpetually the same age? (I am completely down with metaphorical constructs living in a dimensional pocket where time stands still and they never change, but Tickled Pink throws off the whole theory)
3. Does everybody else remember her, or is it just me?
4. If everybody else does remember her, then why don't I?
5. Why does Patty O'Green always have band-aids on her knees?
6. What is *up* with Buddy Blue's headband?
7. Am I overthinking this, and should I go get drunk and try to forget I ever did Internet research on the Color Kids?

Answers, people. I'm looking for answers.










Not that, as a six-year-old, I wouldn't have cheerfully accepted either magical flying horse, as it was really a tossup between getting Stormy's hair or Rainbow's belt.

Okay. Moving on... *creeps away*