Multi-subobject material animation corrupting subobject color values?

I have 3 animation layers for a pacman clone I'm working on. I try to separate the things I'm animating so it gets added to the current state of the ghost mesh additively. But I'm trying to animate the material color of the eyes/mouth/body to flash at the end of the frightened period, and when I try to change the eye white sub-object material, it also changes the pupil sub-object material color. See image below:

If you go outside of the animation editor, and change just the eye white color or the pupil color, it allows you to edit them independently, but in the animation they appear to be bound.

I tried scripting the color change, but it only let's me change the material colors for the eyes, and mouth but not the body. I suspect this is because the eyes/mouth material colors aren't involved in any material color animations before I added this state, and the body material color animation is. Does anyone have a clue how I can achieve this?