Transcription
Despite their low consumer costs, long shelf life, and high nutritional value, it's hard to sell people on raisins as a snack food. Enter the California Raisins, a quartet of singing claymation characters who made it to the top of the charts, hung out with a slew of celebrities, and had a popular TV hit. Today, we're talking about how the California Raisins became a national phenomenon. But before we get started, make sure to subscribe to the Weird History Food Channel, and let us know what other forgotten food commercial mascots you would like to hear about.
Okay, let me go on like a raisin in the sun. Before the formation of the California Raisins, marketing teams all over the world were desperately trying to sell parents on the idea that kids loved raisins. The best they'd done up to that point in terms of marketing spin was branding them as nature's candy. Oh, nature's candy. Raisins from California. But the marketing for the wrinkly grapes had been in decline since the '40s, when the end of World War II led to a surplus of raisins in California, and people stopped fear hoarding massive quantities of dried fruit. The return of European agriculture didn't help matters, as the international interest in America's raisin offerings diminished significantly. Cuz let's be honest, you can only get so excited about raisins. And now you're selling it. You want to sell it.
The California Raisin Advisory Board, or Cal Rab, tried everything to put their snack back on track. They petitioned for government aid, and used the money to buy expensive time slots for their commercials. Nothing was really clicking. In the 1970s, Cal Rab began working with Foote, Cone & Belding, which is an advertising agency and not a trio of Roald Dahl villains. Foote, Cone & Belding came up with the nature's candy theme, which failed to grab the public's attention. So, the advertisers tried a different strategy that was more adult-oriented. The next commercial spot featured savory raisins dropping from unseen heights onto a variety of salads and desserts, while sensual jazz music played in the background. Weirdly, no one was chomping at the bit for that campaign, either, as raisins have yet to replace strawberries as the sexiest fruit.
In 1986, an ad man named Will Vinton was tapped to create something juicy for the California Raisins campaign. Vinton, employed at Foote, Cone & Belding, had just launched a hugely successful campaign at Domino's for something called the Noid. The Noid was the manifestation of all the obstacles that stood in the way of getting your piping hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. People loved the Noid, despite the character being an unabashed nightmare fuel. A claymation man dressed in a red bunny suit with a large N stamped on the front. Ooh. Did we mention the Noid was claymation? Well, let's underline that because it's important. Vinton had begun experimenting with clay animation in the 1970s, winning an Academy Award for his 8-minute short Closed Mondays in 1974. Still, coming up with the California Raisins would prove to be a challenge. As Vinton explained in a later interview, "People were afraid to portray fruit as humanoid characters. There was an unwritten rule in advertising," Vinton recalled, "you don't represent food as some sort of living and breathing thing. And if you're going to anthropomorphize your food, it's probably best to avoid doing so in claymation, generally regarded as the creepiest of all art forms." For example, one of Vinton's animated projects, The Amazing Adventures of Mark Twain, features the famous author leading a group of kids to the far reaches of the multiverse to meet with a mysterious stranger without a face who calls himself Satan. So, of course, when deciding who should help market fruit to children, Foote, Cone & Belding went to Vinton. And even Vinton wasn't immediately sold on the project because he thought raisins were uniquely hideous. "A raisin is kind of an uninteresting form," he would later say. "It's a shriveled, dried, darkish thing. If you're not careful, it can look like a potato or a turd." Still, Vinton loved a good challenge as much as the next guy, and soon claymation's answer to Don Draper was hard at work claymating the hell out of some purple dancing California Raisins.
The California Raisins' debut was a television commercial featuring a quartet of the humanoid characters, all singing and dancing to the Marvin Gaye classic "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." A copywriter named Seth Warner had come up with the idea for the campaign. America was jonesing for the song after being reintroduced to it in The Big Chill. After signing on Vinton, the team approached one-time Jimi Hendrix drummer and Carlos Santana collaborator Buddy Miles as lead vocals for the Raisins. On a $7.5 million advertising budget, the California Raisins, who, don't worry, will be given names and backstories soon enough, were off to the claymaces. Off to the claymaces, off to the races. Yeah, that's a That's a tough one. I agree. It took four whole months to create the California Raisin campaign, but by the time they debuted in September 1986, the effects were immediate. Despite their terrifyingly pruny visage, the California Raisins' version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was a smashing success. Raisin sales spiked by 20%. Variants of both the commercial and the song were released, some of which involved celebrity talent. Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, and Whoopi Goldberg all starred in their own commercials with the California Raisins, though fortunately for us, Whoopi's never made it to air. Still, it was a grape success. See what they're doing there? Yeah, I kind of hope they get better, too.
The California Raisins became a marketing juggernaut. Hardee's soon reached out for permission to manufacture a toy line to put in their kids' meals. You know how all the kids clamor for their Hardee's version of a Happy Meal just so they could find out which raisin they got? No? Well, that was a thing back in the 1980s. The California Raisins merchandising snowballed into 300 different products, including clothing, bedsheets, Halloween costumes, car accessories, lunchboxes, and even toilet paper, which, considering what Vinton said about their original design, is all kinds of Alanis Morissette ironic. It's hard to overstate just how gangbusters "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" turned out to be. The commercial cracked Billboard's Hot 100 that year, coming in at 84. That's impressive for any group, but remember, the California Raisins weren't a real band. They were a commercial for raisins, which arguably makes their Billboard ranking even more impressive. Wisely intuiting that this kind of publicity doesn't last forever, Cal Rab rushed out production of a whole album. You think the whole appeal of these characters, who were essentially tiny clay turds singing Motown covers, would be in their visual novelty, but it turns out people really wanted to sit through an entire album's worth of material and imagine raisins singing to them. California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs hit shelves in 1987, and was followed by three more albums: Christmas with the California Raisins, Meet the Raisins in 1988, and Sweet, Delicious, and Marvelous in 1990. You'd think that in life, much like in fruitcake, too many raisins would spoil your appetite, but that just wasn't the case for the California Raisins. Two of the claymation crooners' albums went platinum. People were craving the raisins. The raisins sang a rendition of a lot of nostalgic doo-wop, from "My Girl" by the Temptations to "Frosty the Snowman." Realizing the marketing opportunity, Vinton put the California Raisins in his claymation Christmas celebration for CBS that winter. The uncanny valley of a variety show was hosted by two dinosaurs in Santa outfits who told children the story of the first Christmas. You think the four anthropomorphic raisins doing a choreographed performance of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" would barely have registered, but like all things California Raisins at the time, people went grape over the segment. See, grape. That was a good one.
The success of the Christmas special set the stage, so to speak, for the California Raisins' very own television special. With all this legitimate success coming their way, advertisers and customers alike began treating the California Raisins as if they were a legitimate music group, which at the time was pretty spectacular. This was before the days of brands trying to replicate normal human social interactions on Twitter, or when a one-off Hanes commercial starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny could become a legitimate film franchise. But hey, even Ted Lasso started out as a commercial. By 1988, the Raisins had already minted their first platinum album, palled around with Michael Jackson, and had a hit segment in a CBS primetime Christmas special. Basically, they were One Direction, if One Direction were the Halloween treat every trick-or-treater immediately throws away. Clearly, the time had come for a mockumentary, a behind-the-music-style parody called Meet the Raisins. CBS aired the show, which finally gave us the much-needed backstories on the California Raisins that we'd all been dying to know. In it, we follow the story of two raisin brothers, AC and Beebop, on their tumultuous journey to musical stardom. Along the way, they met two other like-minded former grapes, Red and Stretch. Demonstrating an extraordinary amount of staying power for a fruit-based advertising campaign, Meet the Raisins won an Emmy, which means the California Raisins have more Emmys than Jason Alexander. Something is not right in the world. It was followed by an appropriately titled sequel 2 years later called The California Raisins: Sold Out.
But while the group and the entire raisin market enjoyed a swift rise to success, they were unknowingly barreling toward a merciless fall from grace. To understand what went wrong with the California Raisins, we need to look at the larger industry they were supporting. Many of the laws and regulations regarding raisin farming in California had not been updated since the Great Depression. Even as the demand for raisins grew, it was barely making a dent on the financial strain put on farmers by government-sponsored crop reserve policies. Over time, the novelty of the California Raisins wore off as Americans looked elsewhere for their commercial entertainment. The dwindling success of the Raisins spelled trouble for California farmers, who saw sales begin to slide. The California Raisins weren't entirely at fault. They'd be resting far too much blame on their shoulders. They don't really have shoulders. Let's go with heads. They're basically all head. Internationally, grape production was on the rise as Europeans remembered that vineyards were technically grape orchards. The issue of marketability and sales compounded, leaving farmers in fear of a surplus. Even today, years after the California Raisins left their indelible mark on pop culture, fears remain that California's raisin economy is on its last gasp.
The end of the California Raisins' career came not with a doo-wop bang, but a doo-wop whimper. They lasted 5 years until 1990, when Cal Rab found the campaign too expensive to keep collaborating. In fact, the marketing budget by the end of the campaign was double the amount of sales from the fruit. Cal Rab itself wasn't long for this world, and by 1994 was no more. The California Raisins have been kept alive in the hearts of those who remember them, from Simpsons parodies to American Dad parodies to an It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia parody. The California Raisins continue in the collective cultural junk drawer, right next to the Pogs. So, what do you think? Do you remember the California Raisins? Were you a fan? Let us know in the comments below, and while you're at it, check out some of these other videos from Our Weird History Food.