The Zelda movie has its cast
(nichegamer.com)
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The Legend of Zelda Famicon NES box art
Zelda A Link to the Past box art
Both debatable / not consistent across official art. First brown-ish, SNES dark blond.
[Zelda A Link to the Past box art for the GBA version blond] (https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/zelda_gamepedia_en/images/a/aa/ALttPFS_JP_Box.jpg)
The GBA version came after Ocarina of time, so I would agree they lightened Link's hair.
Edit : There is official The Legend of Zelda art where Link has solid brown hair, or blond hair.
Brown :https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/zelda_gamepedia_en/images/f/fa/TLoZ_Link_Carrying_Treasures_Artwork.png
Blond : https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/zelda_gamepedia_en/images/8/86/TLoZ_Link_Kneeling_Artwork.png
So not ''all'' but certainly ''many'' depictions of early Link with brown hair.
In Zelda II, Link's hair is more consistently brown or light brown. In the 1980's Zelda cartoon, Link has dark brown hair... but on the DVD release cover ( published in 2005 ) they put Link with dark blond hair : https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/zelda_gamepedia_en/images/2/28/LoZ_DVD_cover.jpg
And let's ignore the pink hair in the actual SNES game, which I always assumed was part of his hat when I was a kid...
I remember someone saying that was a deliberate choice for visual clarity and it was meant to be light brown per the manual.
Either way, he has been brown enough in his early days that you don't really need to wig him up to portray him, as long as its not heavy dark brown. But its good to get the confirmation from all the sources, appreciate that.
I think a lot of it has to do with Japan themselves, both their variation on limited hair colors (despite them basically all having black hair, they use dozens of colors to depict it in their media) and their historical stigma on blonde hair. By the time of OoT maybe they were less afraid to run with it.
I haven't heard of this. I know back in the 80s blonde hair on real people was seen as a punk/gyaru style, unless you're talking about something else.
Blonde isn't a natural Japanese hair color, so the only people with it have bleached it intentionally. The most common people to do so are teenage/young adult delinquents trying to standout, who were very much unliked by basically everyone for a lot of reasons. It ranged from begrudging tolerance to outright stigmatization.
While they have somewhat relaxed their views on it to not assume the person it an outright criminal for having it, similar to how the West softened on tattoos/piercings/hair dye ourselves, it still has a stereotype associated with it. Enough so that modern Japanese media uses it as a shorthand for standard character types quite often, even in universes with all sorts of hair colors also present.
These are very collectivist, social cohesion people. It being associated with punks and other hoodlums isn't nearly as easy for them to brushoff as it is for us.