American Pop Culture comes in a vast variety of forms. The California Raisins didn’t emerge from a popular TV show or a movie or a toy but instead, The Raisins became superstars with a 30 second commercial on September 14, 1986.
It all began in the mid-80s when the California Raisin Advisory Board (CALRAB) started to look for a way to make raisins a cool thing to eat. After few failed attempts, the CALRAB called Oscar-winner Will Vinton [who passed away in 2018] to create clay animation figures for a commercial using Marvin Gaye’s 86 hit “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”.
Vinton and his team hired human dancers to make the Raisins’s dance moves look realistic. Because animators arranged each shot by hand, giving each raisin its own distinct personality (including individualized facial expressions and colorful sunglasses), the commercial took more than a month to shoot.
As for the music, the commercial featured Buddy Miles, a Carlos Santana collaborator and drummer for Jimi Hendrix, singing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”—picked because of the obvious connection between grapes and raisins, but also because the song had seen a resurgence after the Marvin Gaye version had been used for the opening scene of the 1983 hit movie The Big Chill.
The first commercial was such a success. The president of music label Priority Records decided to give the fictional characters a real shot at a music career. The label hired musicians to produce the music and vocals for the Raisins in a 4 album run on the label!
The band’s signature tune “Grapevine” charted the Billboard Hot 100 and its full length music video was aired on MTV and VH1. 2 of their albums featuring other Motown Hits covers went to platinum so the big guns were now hired to get the grapes to the higher stratosphere!
Ray Charles and Michael Jackson would join the Raisins to sing their own versions of “Grapevine” and appearing as claymation themselves.
Michael Jackson agreed to do the commercial for free with the condition that he only work with Vinton who he knew from their work on “Captain Eo”. Michael helped creating his own claymation raisin with the signature single white glove and fedora.
Vinton went to work with Michael again for the movie “Moonwalker” where you can see his talent on “Speed Demon” segment.
The success was so big that the company started to capitalized on merchandise in the image of the raisins characters! Lunch boxes, T-Shirts, Costumes, Figurines were created and even a Nintendo video game came to life! Fan clubs started to appear across the land and the raisins got their own comic books!
The success of The California Raisins commercials also launched the band into small-screen fame. The band appeared in CBS’s A Claymation Christmas Celebration, a 1987 holiday special that would win an Emmy award. The next year, the Raisins got their own Emmy-nominated special with Meet the Raisins!, a mockumentary that told a fictional story of the band’s rise to stardom, giving each member names for the first time—A.C., Bebop, Stretch, and Red. The group even got their own (short-lived) Saturday morning cartoon show, The California Raisins Show.
Like every pop culture phenomenon, the success of The California Raisins came to an end with the last campaign in 1994. CALRAB decided that the production costs was too high to carry on the venture, especially the popularity of the raisins was in decline!
But with nostalgia and collectors, The California Raisins have became a 80s pop culture icons.
In 2015, a plan to reboot the California Raisins was in talk with the creation of a movie but those plans never came to life.
Today people around the world are collecting the California Raisins merchandise and for us, Michael Jackson fans, we can be part of it. Michael Raisin got his own little figurine and it is a great item to add to any fan’s collection [available at King of Shop]
SOURCE: Wikipedia / Iconic Magazine Issue #8 – Interview with Will Vinton / Cartoonbrew
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