MGWCC #841, “Then Things Got Shady” – 7/17/24 deadline
Amy halfway filling in for Joon this week. Here’s my filled-in grid for “Then Things Got Shady.” We have colorful answers going from top to bottom:
- ELMO is red
- ROBIN’S EGG is blue
- EGGPLANT is purple (except when it’s one of those white eggplants)
- HOME DEPOT LOGO is orange (the store likes to pretend The Home Depot is what everyone calls it, but their url is homedepot dot com so who are they fooling?)
- SNOW PEAS are green
- OPEN SPACE is colorless
- CORN is yellow
(Thank you, pannonica, for pointing me to ELMO and CORN, which were hiding from me because they’re shorter.)
And then NBC is the [Company identified with a six-color bird], with that OPEN SPACE being where the bird proper resides, the six colors being the peacock’s tail feathers. The NBC logo’s colors appear in yellow-orange-red-purple-blue-green order rather than rainbow order, and there’s no indigo in sight.
I figured we needed to find the title of a well-known NBC show. pannonica figured it out, and I did not. Not much space in a 13×13 grid to hide extra thematic answers beyond the eight elements mentioned above. Didn’t see anything in the clues that helped me. Reading Rainbow was a PBS show. Meet the Press might use the NBC peacock in its logo, but that sure didn’t give me any sort of click.
I’m sure plenty of commenters can explain how they derived the meta solution. Please do!
I anagrammed the first letters of the 6 color answers (open space not included) to get Cheers, famous NBC show.
No need to anagram. Take the six key answers in the order of the colors in the NBC logo:
Yellow –> CHEERS
Orange –> HOME DEPOT LOGO
Red –> ELMO
Purple –> EGGPLANT
Blue –> ROBIN’S EGG
Green –> SNOW PEAS
Doh! I didn’t even think of looking at the logo…
I think you meant ‘Yellow –> CORN’
Lol, whoops. I had CHEERS on the brain.
So, OPENSPACE (the peacock’s body) was included solely to point to using that particular order?
I knew it had to be a famous NBC show and when I googled Friends, the picture that came up included each of the six colors in the open spaces between the letters of Friends, I thought for sure that was it so I submitted. When I wasn’t on the board, I looked again and in other seasons, the six dots were two red, two yellow and two blue (not all six different colors like I originally saw) so that screwed me up.
Thanks for writing this up, Amy! Wednesday deadline threw me off.
321 right answers, of which 270 were solo solves. So on the low end, but not quite Week 2 Curse territory.
As Evan pointed out, you find the six colorful things on the Acrosses, arrange them in the order of the NBC logo by color, and voila — CHEERS appears.
I’m going to continue to respectfully disagree with the statement that “Open Space” implies “colorless’. No city dweller yearns to enjoy the colorless areas, outside the city, and the notion of green open space is what is clued in the puzzle.
Open space can be used to ferer to the colorless portion of a graphic, or the open space in a bedroom, but the open space that’s prized by city dwellers is not a void.
With a different clue, sure, but as the only one of the 5 long across entries that was not meta-related, “open space” was a technical flaw in this grid.
Strong disagree, the entries weren’t required to be 100% symmetrical and there were indeed two asymmetries (on purpose) to steer solvers away from that.