Vintage 1980s California Raisins 📌 Complete Set All 9 Tin Pins

🍇 Remember When Raisins Could Dance?

Size: 1 1/2"

I still catch myself humming it — that bassline hit, and a whole gang of clay raisins in sunglasses and sneakers would strut across the screen like they owned the place. If you were anywhere near a TV in the late '80s, you know exactly the feeling I mean. This is a complete set of nine California Raisins pinback buttons, each one its own little personality: a surfer riding a blue wave on a red board, a singer with a red microphone and a blue bow tie, a saxophone player, one in red sunglasses pointing skyward, another in red sunglasses pointing with both hands, one smiling and pointing up, one with a hand near its face, one with both gloved hands raised by its cheeks, and a tennis player in orange sunglasses with a racket and ball. Nine different poses, all from the same grinning cast.

When I first saw these I had to say WOW all over again - the memories came flooding back, and I went to YouTube and watched every single Raisin video ever made. Nothing is better than a song sung by a California Raisin! They were invented in 1986, and they keep popping up for events and cameos over the years without my noticing - I've been missing out. And I've seen people call these pins 1970s, but that just isn't possible.

📺 Where They Came From

The California Raisin Advisory Board — known in the trade simply as CALRAB — was a state marketing board headquartered in Fresno, California, at the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, the region that grows the overwhelming majority of the country's raisins. By the mid-1980s, the board had a real problem: raisins were a tough sell to a generation raised on convenience snacks, and every conventional pitch had failed to move the needle.

The idea that saved it started as a pitch nobody was sure would work. Seth Werner, a copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding's office in San Francisco, California, came up with dancing raisins set to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" — Marvin Gaye's Motown hit — and the story told ever since is that he floated it as a joke: the board had tried every pitch there was except raisins dancing to "Grapevine." It was a smart pick: the song had just come back to a whole new generation through the opening of The Big Chill in 1983, and it's a song about grapes, which is where raisins come from. The room laughed, and then the California Raisin Advisory Board, the growers' own promotion board, actually ran with it. The first thirty-second commercial aired September 14, 1986, and it turned a fruit nobody thought twice about into the thing everyone was talking about.

🎬 Claymation and the Cast Behind the Cast

Will Vinton's studio animated them frame by frame — the same Vinton who later trademarked the word "Claymation" itself. Will Vinton Studios was out of Portland, Oregon, and Vinton had already won an Academy Award, for the short Closed Mondays. His crew shot live dancers doing the moves as a guide, then posed the clay one frame at a time - every raisin nudged, reshaped and given a fresh expression - so that first thirty-second spot took over a month. Michael Brunsfeld designed their now-iconic look, and Buddy Miles — the drummer who played with Jimi Hendrix and recorded with Carlos Santana — sang lead. The very first commercial, "Late Show," took home the Lion d'Argent at Cannes, "Lunch Box" won a Clio Award, and "Raisin Ray" brought back the Gold Award for Best Animated TV Commercial from the Houston International Film Festival. Not bad at all for an ad about dried fruit.

Then the stars came calling. Ray Charles got the clay treatment in a 1988 spot, singing his own "Grapevine." Michael Jackson got his own raisin as well - as fans tell it, he asked no fee and set one condition: Will Vinton had to be the one animating him, since the two knew each other from Disney's Captain EO. He helped design his own claymation "Michael Raisin," complete with the single white glove and a fedora, and those spots ran mostly in movie theaters. The Raisin board said both stars made their ads at no fee.

🍔 The Hardee's Years

Hardee's put them in kids' hands with molded California Raisins figurines in 1987 — given away with its Cinnamon 'N' Raisin biscuit promotion — again in 1988, and once more in 1991, and a 2001 collection came out under the Carl's Jr. name too, after Carl's Jr.'s parent bought Hardee's in the late 1990s. By then the Raisins had two television specials, Meet the Raisins and Raisins Sold Out, their own Saturday morning cartoon, The California Raisin Show, which ran 13 episodes, and a turn in A Claymation Christmas Celebration (they did "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"), the special that won Will Vinton an Emmy. There was even an album, The California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs, the first of four studio albums the band put out in 1987 and 1988. The merchandise ran from lunch boxes and T-shirts to costumes and comic books, plus a 1988 home-computer game - and Capcom even finished a Nintendo game, The Grape Escape, in 1990, then never released it. The licensing ran through Applause Licensing of Woodland Hills, California - a 1988 Raisins poster in The Henry Ford's collection is credited "for Will Vinton Productions for Applause Licensing" - and Applause made Raisins figures of its own, marked CALRAB. My favorite bit of trivia: it was Meet the Raisins, on CBS on November 4, 1988, that finally gave the band names — A.C. Arborman on vocals, his younger brother Beebop Arborman on drums, their cousin Red Raisin on guitar and piano, and their friend Stamford "Stretch" Thompson on bass. For a few years there, they were everywhere.

🏛️ From the San Joaquin to the Smithsonian

Even the Smithsonian took notice, and a good many of the pieces made for the campaign are part of its permanent collection today. The National Museum of American History holds a California Raisin figure and its armature, props from the claymation sets, sixteen pencil sketches from about 1986 to 1991, a School Friends Collector Album and a 1991 T-shirt. Nine buttons in a row make an instant collection the Smithsonian would be proud of, I'm sure! It's a genuinely American story: an agricultural trade board out of Fresno, a San Francisco ad agency, and a Portland animation studio combining to build something that outgrew its own assignment entirely. And the Raisins are still being studied — in 2025 Ed Timke, an advertising professor at Michigan State University, presented research at CHARM, the marketing-history conference, held that year at Brunel University London, under the title "Consuming Black Culture: The Materiality and Cultural Exploitation of the California Raisins Campaign."

📉 The Twist Nobody Put on the Lunch Box

Here's the part the merchandise never told you: that first commercial actually worked — raisin sales rose about 20 percent after it aired. But running the whole campaign, the commercials, the specials, the licensing, cost the growers almost twice what it brought back in. The California Raisin Advisory Board closed its doors on July 31, 1994, after the farmers themselves balked at the fees. The characters didn't disappear, though — the rights passed to the State of California, and from 1998 on they were licensed out through the California Raisin Marketing Board. It's a genuinely bittersweet story: the ad worked, and it still wasn't enough to save the board that made it.

📌 What's In This Set

Nine round buttons, 1.5 inches each (about 3.8 cm), on plain white grounds: the surfer, the singer, the saxophone player, the two in red sunglasses, the one smiling and pointing up, the one with a hand near its face, the one with both hands raised by its cheeks, and the tennis player. The surfing raisin carries a full blue wave behind him, and the saxophone player is drawn in enough detail that you can see the instrument's bell. Flip one over and you'll find a metal face shell crimped over a white plastic back with a gold-tone safety pin, and no printing anywhere, front or back.

A note on condition: these turned up in a warehouse, all in big boxes together for some 40 years~ and then got moved, so some might have a mark or blemish. Most sellers list them as new, but if you follow me you know I am meticulous about condition.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🎨 Set all nine in three rows of three in a shadow box - instant 1980s Americana for a den or a media room
• 👜 Cluster them on a jean jacket, a tote bag or an old ball cap for a throwback anyone will recognize
• 🏡 Arrange them on a corkboard alongside other California Raisins collectibles — PVC figures, a lunchbox, an album cover — for a display that tells the whole story
• 🎁 Frame them behind glass with a printed card showing the band members' names and the 1986 debut date
• 🎶 Put them by the turntable - the whole campaign was built on R&B and Motown
• 📚 Build a bigger 1980s advertising shelf around them, with Garbage Pail Kids cards, fast-food premiums and the other mascots of the decade

Who goes for a full set like this? Folks who were kids in the mid-to-late '80s, when the Raisins were as much a part of life as Saturday cartoons and a Hardee's biscuit; the Raisins completists; claymation and Will Vinton fans who see the Raisins as a landmark of American commercial animation; and pop-culture and advertising collectors. My favorite group, though, is the people who just see the buttons and feel what I felt - a rush of memory and joy.

The nostalgia (and the value) on these isn't going away any time soon, so wear them for fun or put them up as decor. Pin the whole set to a jacket, line them up on a shelf, whatever you like — they're still one of my favorite little relics of that whole raisin-shaped moment in advertising history, and I like knowing a piece of that story is going out the door with them. The supply is finite - nobody's turning out new 1980s Raisins buttons, and once these last sets are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.