inspired by the JUG

The two kits are of the same quality and share the same moldings except for the obvious differences in fuselage & canopies. The Jug was never used in Navy or Marine service. The pic in the post you are refering to was an Air Force bird and painted Olive Drab over Neutral Grey. The decals for that scheme are included in the Razorback kit.

That is truly bizarre. On my monitor, that jug appears blue, all blue from what I can tell with a flat white cowling. Am I nuts, colorblind or both?

The pic appeared to have some backlighting and was somewhat under-exposed, but it looks more green than blue on my monitor.

OK then, olive drab, but is anyone aware of these planes being ever in navy or marine colors, blues for instance?

If you want to do a blue scheme, the 56th Fighter Group did their bubble top P-47M's in a two tone blue. Do a search here. There have been several posts about it. Revell-Germany makes a 72nd kit. A48th and you would have to do some scratch building. There are decals available in both scales.

There were some that were painted odd blues and black. Some were P-47Ms (a modified bubbletop D) used in England by the 56th Fighter Group. These didnt have underwing racks and used a larger turbocharger along with water/methanol injection. Though not initially built to do so they were used to counter buzzbombs and jets and were the fastest production P-47. They usually had some odd wavy blue with black scheme and huge bomber size national insignia. Aeromaster had some decals for them too...
http://www.eaglestrikeproductions.com/cgi-bin/amddecals.pl?scale=48&setid=015&dbs=aeromaster&pgs=2&currpg=1&dclimg=ad48015

Superscale has some too and I believe these are a little more accurate because of their larger bomber size insignia. http://www.greatmodels.com/cgi/display.cgi?item_num=ssd480587

I also remember seeing some Pacific based P-47s painted blue but cant find any references for them.

If you want to wait a bit, Hasegawa has announced a 1/48 P-47M for June release. Hopefully a modified version of their P-47D and not just a re-box with new decals. The box art shows a 56th Fighter Group bird in the dark blue over light blue upper camo and bare metal undersides, so it's safe to assume decals for that bird will be in the kit.

I'm building the Bubbletop and it looks to be an excellent kit.

The P-47 was never in Navy or Marine service. Several Air Forces around the world have used it, but it is not capable of carrier landings. I have modified a razorback P-47 with a taihook in the past and given it a tricolor blue scheme, but that was just a fantasy model.

The was at least one occasion when army air force jugs were launched from aircraft carriers. This was when a P-47 unit was transported to the Island of Saipan late in the war.

I hope Hasegawa gets the engine nose case right. It was the split case type in the P-47M like the P-47N.