And that is why they couldn't give away red ones in the 80s.
I don't know. If they couldn't "give them away" in the '80s, then why was the color available from 1985 to 1998, and most of them with black trim?
But I'll agree that colors other than the evergreen trio (Fireglo, Jetglo, and Mapleglo) are comparatively a tough sell. Some of my personal favorite colors were poor sellers: Sea Green, Turquoise, Ruby. The trouble with marketing on nostalgia is that the buyers mostly want the old standby colors and features. Höfner tried red burst and blue burst 500/1 basses around 2000-'01, and apparently had difficulty selling only a hundred or so. The traditional brown burst (or violin finish or whatever they call it) sells like hotcakes.