The color, broken down
Four ways to describe one color. Each slider in the game maps to one of these dimensions.
- HEX
#BF3332
- RGB
- 191, 51, 50
- HSB
- 0°, 74%, 75%
- HSL
- 0°, 59%, 47%
Nearby tones that look right and are wrong
#BF4532
#BF3245
#BF4949
#BF1B1B
#9C2828
How this color came to be
Mickey Mouse first appeared in Steamboat Willie in 1928, but his red shorts only joined him later — the original Mickey was a black-and-white silhouette, and color came in stages through the 1930s as Technicolor adoption spread. By the time the Disney palette was standardized for color shorts, Mickey's shorts had settled into the red they've held ever since: warm, deep, never quite as bright as a fire engine.
At HSB(0°, 74%, 75%), this color sits exactly on the red baseline of the color wheel, but it's stepped down on both saturation and brightness from a "pure" red. That's the secret of the color and the most common reason players guess wrong. The instinct is to slide everything to the top — full red, full saturation, full brightness. Mickey's shorts don't live there. They live one full step in, on the side of the spectrum where red starts feeling earthy rather than electric.
This kind of red has a name in design language: brick red, or sometimes "broadcast red." It was favored historically because saturated reds bleed and shimmer on analog television, and a stepped-down red holds its shape across a wider range of screens and lighting conditions. Decades later, the merchandising version is locked to this same in-by-25% red, and it's what your memory is matching against.
How to match it from memory
Calibrated to this character's specific hex, not generic color advice.
- Leave hue at pure red (0°).
- Drop saturation about a quarter of the way from max — around 75%.
- Drop brightness about a quarter of the way from max — around 75%.
- Common mistake: too bright and too saturated, landing in fire-engine red.
