Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Orions
9. Blue Is The New Green
The Animated Series episode The Pirates of Orion was the first to show the males of the species… and they were blue. The behind-the-scenes story of how those who now go by 'House Azure' came to be is muddier than a Tellarite mud bath. Various reasons have been given over the years. None has really stuck.
On the DVD extra Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series, Dorothy Fontana famously attributed the show's preponderance of pink to the fact that director Hal Sutherland was colourblind. TAS storyboard artist Robert Kline, on the other hand, pointed the finger (and pencil) at colleague Irvin Kaplan. As Kline stated in Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series:
Pink equals Irv Kaplan […]. Irv was in charge of ink and paint, coloring the various characters and props […]. You'll see it in a lot of scenes, purple and green used together […]. He made dragons red, the Kzintis' costumes pink. It was all Irv Kaplan's call. He wasn't listening to anyone else when he picked colors or anything.
Of course, that's only half of approaching an answer, and it doesn't really explain why Devna was a kind of pale green in The Time Trap. There's also the little matter of pronunciation to get to…