A company cannot strictly speaking own a colour, but they are allowed to trademark it if they can justify that it represents their brand – and many have tried to enforce their exclusive claim to a slice of the spectrum in the courts.
Minion Yellow is the latest in a long history of trademarked colours, from Coke red ( Pantone 484) to Starbucks emerald green ( Pantone 3298C). But woe betide any other company or designer that now tries to use a similar shade for commercial gain. It joins the ranks of Crushed Grape and Tangerine Tango in Pantone’s “fashion, home and interiors” palette, with the aim of getting child fans to nag their parents to paint their rooms Minion Yellow. The branded shade is intended to be used – but only in the privacy of your own home. Pantone, a company with an effective monopoly over the colour specification industry, perhaps fits nicely within this tyrannical timeline.īecause, while Pantone claims Minion Yellow “projects playfulness and warmth and is suggestive of intellectual curiosity,” it turns out that intellectual property might be the real value its colour embodies.
#PANTONE COLOR BUTTERCUP YELLOW MOVIE#
Charting their evolution, the movie tells how the creatures dutifully served baddies from the beginning of time –from a Tyrannosaurus rex, to an Egyptian pharaoh, to Dracula – before becoming henchmen for Scarlet Overkill, the world’s first female super-villain.
The company says the hue is “designed to represent the sweet and subversive characters,” and it is perhaps an appropriate partnership, given the Minions’ only purpose is to serve history’s most villainous masters. The colour was conveniently launched to coincide with the release of Universal Pictures’ spin-off film, Minions, which grossed $114.2m (£74.1m) in its opening weekend, making it the second-highest opening of all time for an animated movie. Photograph: PantoneĪlthough Pantone produces a branded “ colour of the year”, and is no stranger to commercial partnerships, this is the first time the company has stooped to producing a character-branded colour as a stunt for a summertime blockbuster. Minion Yellow, designed ‘to represent the sweet and subversive characters’.
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