I'd assume most didn't notice because 1.) he's highly reflective, so the distinction between gold and silver is easily missed in certain environments, and 2.) I don't recall it ever being a point of focus or the camera ever focusing on his lower half enough that anyone should have noticed. I'm not a Star Wars fan, so this one didn't quite blow my mind, but still odd that many fans didn't catch it.
I honestly blame time, technology and weird brains. A lot if not most people probably saw it in VHS on a CRT the first time which wouldn't have the sharpest image or color, if you remember that very specific sort of fuzzy kind of grey look that a lot of films in the 70s had. So it may not be particularly easy to pick out the color to begin with.
Also, this, which I learned about today after a weird inspection:
It’s that time of year again; when a photo shows us all how broken/amazing our brains are. An image has gone viral of a bowl of strawberries appearing red to the human eye when in actu…
www.google.com
I guess our brains do this really interesting color correction thing when we're faced with colors that aren't fully visible or are otherwise filtered by another color. If you couldn't make out his leg properly, or didn't look directly at it to see clearly, your brain may have just said "it's non-gold because of a shadow or something, I'll fill it in gold".
Today I worked in a warehouse doing inspections that was fully cut off from outside light and illuminated exclusively by sodium vapor lights, which is the old fashioned yellow ass streetlight we all know and love. In an enclosed space they made everything look yellow. In my head though, the place was piled high with multicolor compost and the walls were bright steel. I was actually blown away by how yellow everything was in my photos - to my eye we may as well have been in regular pure sunlight the entire time, but the camera said it was all sickly yellow. We even got them to pull security cams because we didn't believe it.
