Blue hued at home, Vikings show their true colors outdoors

Friday, January 15, 1999

Pioneer Press

•Players' shirts just don't bleed purple


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RICK SHEFCHIK STAFF WRITER
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If the Vikings' jerseys are purple, why do they look so blue on TV?
Why doesn't Viking purple look like Barney purple, or Prince purple?

Why doesn't the purple on the jersey match the purple on the helmet?

We put those questions to a variety of color and fabric experts in an
attempt to ascertain whether the object of Purple Pride indeed is
purple, or some other shade on the spectrum between red and blue.

The answer, officially, is Vikings jerseys are Viking Purple -- because
the National Football League says so.

``Pantone 269 (the official color registration number) is Viking
Purple,'' said Brian McCarthy of NFL Properties, the league's licensing
arm. ``The gold is Pantone 1235. Each licensee is directed to use those
colors. We have 275 licensees who manufacture 1,000 products. Our
quality-control office has been flooded with Vikings product proposals.
Walking in, there's so much purple, it looks like you're backstage at a
Barney concert.''

Dozens of those products, supposedly dyed Viking purple, are on display
in Suzanne Wunsch's Metrodome basement novelty store. Vikings sweat
shirts, T-shirts, caps, jackets, footballs, helmets and jerseys hang
from the walls and ceiling. All are purple. None is the same shade of
purple.

``Each fabric absorbs the dye differently,'' Wunsch said. ``The jerseys
the players wear used to look more like the helmets, the more grapey
purple, until they changed material. The new material (two-color tackle
twill, according to Wunsch) doesn't hold the purple as well.

``In dying something to try to get it to be that Viking color, you take
regular red and blue to get the darker black-purple, then you add some
magenta to get it up to that Viking purple.''

But that Viking purple looks more like Viking deep blue on TV screens,
especially when the team is playing indoors at the Metrodome.

There's an explanation for that.

Vikings equipment manager Dennis Ryan said the Viking purple today might
not look like the Viking purple you remember from the old days at Met
Stadium, but that's a function of lighting and modern fabric. The jersey
material changed from nylon mesh in 1970, Ryan said.

``The jersey color has not changed,'' he said. ``What has changed is the
material. There's a situation with different fabrics and the way they
photograph. They appear to be changing colors. You can look at two
things with the naked eye, and they will match, but take a photograph of
them, and the two things will look totally different.

``That's basically what you see when we're in the Dome in artificial
light. The purple doesn't filter through very well with artificial
lighting. It appears more bluish than purplish. It definitely looks
different (more purple) when we play outdoors in sunlight.''

The trouble is, the Vikings usually wear their purple jerseys only at
home, in the Dome. Besides, most of us don't see the games in person;
we're looking at them through the artificial light and photographic
filters of television.

We took an authentic Vikings replica jersey -- a $165 Starter-made Brad
Johnson model, like the ones the players wear except lacking 3 inches of
extra fabric in the shoulders for shoulder pads -- to a number of color
experts to get their take on what color the Vikings really wear.

At Wet Paint, an artists' supply store on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, we
got a typical response when the jersey was presented for comparison.

``On TV it looks more blue,'' store owner Beth Bergman said.

Bergman brought out a color spectrum and several tubes of paint to try
to make a match. Prism Violet was close; Red Violet and True Violet also
made decent matches, although the front of the jersey is a slightly
darker shade than the shoulders. To make an exact match, Bergman
produced a tube of Dioxazine Purple.

``This is the actual color of the pigment, carbazole dioxazine --
PV-23,'' Bergman said. ``It's a generic -- like the name of the
chemical, or the synthetic organic. It's made in a lab, not from a
mineral or anything.''

Somehow, Carbazole Dioxazine Pride doesn't have much of a ring to it.

At The Treadle, a fabric shop on Grand Avenue, sales clerks Julia
Phillips and Anne Rusterholz pulled ribbons, fabric swatches and bolts
of cloth with names such as Regal Purple, Plum, African Violet, Midnight
and Deep Wisteria to try to make a match. They tried 2 bolts of polar
fleece, one with the name Blue Plum and the other called -- of all
things -- Viking Purple. Surprisingly, the Blue Plum was a closer match
for the jersey than Viking Purple.

``That's a very blue purple,'' they both agreed.

Sue Jacoby, the wall-covering manager at Abbott Paint and Carpet in
Stillwater, initially had difficulty finding a good match for the jersey
but then remembered the Crayola paint kiosk in the corner of the store.

``Crayola is a line of paint made by Benjamin Moore,'' Jacoby said.
``It's used a lot for kids' bedrooms.''

Jacoby found an almost perfect match for Vikings purple and gold: Grape
Jelly and School Bus Yellow. Looking further, she decided that Caution
Yellow was even closer.

``In the realm of decorating, colors have different effects on people,''
Jacoby said. ``Like red makes you hungry, purple is the symbol of power.
I love purple. When I wear one of my purple blouses, my daughter says,
`Mom, I know you have a meeting today, because you're wearing your
purple power suit.' ''

It was a bit tougher matching the Vikings jersey to an auto body paint,
but customer service representative Janice Osterhues at Suburban Auto
Body in Little Canada found one.

Paging through the paint sample book, the General Motors purples looked
gray, but the Ford Bright Sapphire was a close match, and Ford's
Ultraviolet was almost perfect.

That's FA 95:GN for anyone thinking of painting their car after the
Vikings win the Super Bowl.

I would have had a link to this article if the Pioneer Press still had it on their web site. If you have a Passport account, you can use it to enter the Pioneer Press archives. Though this article was sent to me, I believe this is information alot of Viking Fans would like to have.