How to animate a Text Mesh Pro font color transition in Unity when the initial color is unknown?

Question

I have some text where different letters can be different colors:

I'd like to use the Animation feature to transition each letter frame-by-frame until they are white, like this:

The challenge is that each letter is made using a Prefab ("White Letter"), where the Text Mesh Pro Font Color starts off as White. So the Animation tab looks like this, with the RGBA values all set to 1:

After the prefab is instantiated, then the start values for the Font Color look like this:

I'd like to have the initial RGBA values of the Font Color to be "whatever the current color is" and then transition all of the Font Colors to white.

Is it possible to have the Animation tab start values initialize as the current Font Color of the GameObject?

Answer 1

Hackish solution:

Put two texts on top of each other, with the only difference that the one on top is colored and the one below is white. So the colored text completely obscures the white text. Then animate the alpha-property of the colored text to go from 1 to 0, so the white text becomes more visible.