Vintage 1980s Saxophone California Raisin Tin Pin 📌 WOW The Memories!

Remember the California Raisins? 🎷 Vintage 1980s Saxophone Raisin Tin Pin

Size: 1 1/2"

🎷 The Band So Big It Broke the Board That Built It

For eight years a clay band of raisins was all over American television, and the fame is exactly what finished them. The California Raisins sold platinum records, Hardee's figures, lunch boxes and tin buttons, but every commercial was paid for by the raisin growers of Fresno, California, out of their own crop. On July 31, 1994 the California Raisin Advisory Board closed its doors for good. Today the Smithsonian keeps the clay. This saxophone man is what's left for the rest of us to hold.

I need to just say WOW again. When I saw these the memories came flooding back, and I went to YouTube and watched every single Raisin video ever. And let me add: nothing is better than listening to a song sung by a California Raisin!

📌 The Pin

A round tin pinback button, 1 1/2", printed with a single California Raisin on a plain white face. Brown wrinkled body, white cartoon gloves wrapped around a bright yellow saxophone, blue eyelids shut tight, black-and-white shoes planted mid-note. He is the band's horn man, leaning into a solo with his eyes closed. On the back is a gold-tone safety-pin clasp, so it wears as easily as it displays.

The Busy Beaver Button Museum, an archive devoted entirely to pinback buttons, catalogs a California Raisins saxophone button of this description (a raisin in black-and-white shoes playing a yellow sax on a white ground) alongside Raisins buttons showing a singer, a football player, a skateboarder and a hot tub scene.

I have seen some people say these pins are from the 1970s, but it isn't possible. The California Raisins did not exist until 1986, and these came out of the Raisins' heyday in the 1980s.

🍇 Fresno, and the Legend of the Accidental Raisin

The story Fresno tells about itself goes like this. Francis Eisen, a Swedish immigrant, planted a vineyard along Fancher Creek east of Fresno in 1873 with his brother Gustav, meaning to make wine. Then a brutal heat wave rolled through the San Joaquin Valley just before harvest and dried the Muscat grapes right on the vine. Rather than lose the crop, Eisen packed the shriveled fruit and took it to San Francisco, where it was sold as an exotic import. In the most-repeated version of the legend, a grocer there put them out as "Peruvian Delicacies." Tellers disagree on whether the heat came in 1873 or 1877. Either way, a ruined harvest became an industry.

The women came next, and history mostly forgot them. Minnie Austin, a Nantucket-born schoolteacher, and fellow teacher Lucy Hatch had burned out in the classrooms of Chicago and San Francisco. They bought into M. Theo Kearney's Central California Colony and planted the Hedgerow Vineyard on Elm Avenue, with two more teachers, E.A. Cleveland and J.B. Short, as silent partners. Austin and Hatch shipped their first raisin crop in 1878 under the Austin brand, likely the first packaged raisins ever sent out of Fresno, and by 1886 they were shipping 7,500 boxes a year. They were the first to sulfur their vines at bloom and the first to use a raisin dehydrator. Austin died in 1889. Hatch lived until 1926 and spent her last years urging growers to stay united under the Sun-Maid banner.

That banner was born in the same valley. The name Sun-Maid was coined in 1915 by advertising man E.A. Berg, and the girl in the red bonnet was a real young woman, Lorraine Collett, who handed out raisins at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition that year. In 1918 Sun-Maid opened a plant near downtown Fresno. By the early 1980s, though, raisins had become a hard sell, and the growers needed something nobody had tried.

🔍 What Is Printed on This Button

Nothing but the picture. The face carries the saxophone Raisin and no lettering at all — no maker, no license line, no date. Worth saying plainly, because the same artwork was also printed on a button that reads The California Raisins™ in blue script with ©1987 CALRAB beneath it. That marked button is a different piece from this one; this is the unmarked printing.

🎬 "We Have Tried Everything But Dancing Raisins"

The California Raisin Advisory Board, known as CALRAB, was a state marketing board headquartered in Fresno. Growers paid into it to regulate and promote the whole California crop rather than any single brand, and the new campaign got off the ground with an initial $3 million grant from the United States Department of Agriculture. CALRAB took the job to the San Francisco office of the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding.

There, the story goes, a 31-year-old copywriter named Seth Werner, working with his partner Dexter Fedor, threw out a line in frustration: they had tried everything but dancing raisins singing "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." The joke became the pitch. The job went to Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon, the Oscar-winning animation house that had built its name on Claymation, and Michael Brunsfeld drew the character designs. The first 30-second spot cost about $300,000 to make and aired on September 14, 1986. Sunglasses on, high-tops laced, the Raisins shuffled through Marvin Gaye's hit, and raisin sales rose 20 percent after it aired.

The voice was the real thing. Lead vocals came from Buddy Miles, the drummer and singer who had played alongside Jimi Hendrix in the Band of Gypsys. That is a big part of why the Raisins sounded like a soul act instead of a jingle.

📀 Platinum Albums, Hardee's Figures and an Emmy

The Raisins stopped being a commercial and became a band. Their "Grapevine" reached No. 84 on the Billboard Hot 100. Four albums followed across 1987 and 1988, two of them went platinum, and more than 2 million people bought Raisins records, with covers like "Lean on Me" and "You Can't Hurry Love." Hardee's gave away collectible Raisins figures in 1987, 1988 and 1991. Among the licensed Raisins collectibles of the day, the toy company Applause made the little PVC figures marked CALRAB in 1987 and 1988. There were plush toys, air fresheners, comic books and a fan club. Capcom even built a Nintendo game, The California Raisins: The Grape Escape; it was finished and reviewed by critics but never released.

Television came calling. Will Vinton's A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987), featuring the Raisins, won a Primetime Emmy. On November 4, 1988 CBS aired the mockumentary Meet the Raisins!, which was nominated for an Emmy and gave the core band full 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. Stamford! I love that the bass man got the fanciest name in the band. The California Raisin Show cartoon ran 13 episodes in 1989. Ray Charles and Michael Jackson each recorded their own version of "Grapevine" for later commercials, and Jackson, by the popular account, did it for free on the condition that he work with Vinton, whom he knew from Disney's Captain EO.

In the original run of figures, the man on this pin is simply the Saxophone Player: eyes closed, cheeks puffed, leaning back into the blues. When Hardee's first handed out four Raisins figures in 1987, at 99 cents apiece with its Cinnamon 'N' Raisin biscuits, the other three got pun names (Tiny Goodbite the singer, and the dancers Justin X. Grape and Ben Indasun), and my horn man was just the Saxophone Player. Somehow that suits him. He lets the sax do the talking.

📉 How the Fame Became the Problem

This is the part most people never heard. CALRAB was a nonprofit, so it could not keep what the Raisins earned. It poured the proceeds from the campaign back into more advertising, costs climbed with every new spot, and by the end the campaign was costing growers almost twice what it brought them. Growers revolted over the fees they were required to pay, and the board ended on July 31, 1994, citing irreconcilable differences among its members. The characters became property of the State of California. In 1998 a new grower-funded California Raisin Marketing Board was formed and licensed them.

🏛️ The Smithsonian, and the Whole Legacy

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds a sculpted clay California Raisin, Claymation props and wire armatures, sixteen original pencil sketches from the campaign, a Raisins T-shirt and a school friends collector album. The museum's own record describes the figures as developed by Will Vinton Productions in 1986 "based on caricatures of African American rhythm-and-blues groups." That belongs in the story too. The campaign changed the fortunes of a Central Valley crop, and it did it by borrowing its whole sound from Black music: Marvin Gaye's song, Buddy Miles's voice, Ray Charles's cameo. In June 2025 Michigan State University scholars Ed Timke and Christina L. Myers presented "Consuming Black Culture: The Materiality and Cultural Exploitation of the California Raisins Campaign" at CHARM, a marketing-history conference in London, examining how the beloved campaign intersected with cultural appropriation, commercial exploitation and representation.

These are so collectible that the Smithsonian keeps California Raisins material in its collection. Here is an instant collection for you that I am sure the Smithsonian would be proud of!

The supply that was found of these was in a warehouse, all together in big boxes for 40 years~, then moved, so some might have a mark or blemish. Most who have these list them as new, but as you know if you follow me, I am meticulous about the condition.

🖼️ Good For

• A denim jacket, tote or band bag. The safety-pin clasp works the way it was made to.
• An 1980s pop culture shadow box next to cereal-box prizes and Saturday morning memorabilia.
• A record room or practice space, for anybody who plays the horn.
• A California agriculture or Central Valley history display beside a Sun-Maid box.
• A gift for anyone who still hums "Grapevine" when they open a box of raisins.

🎷 About these

It's the saxophone player, eyes shut, horn up - the one from the Raisins' original line-up of figures - and it still pins on a jacket or a backpack just like it did in the 80s, or it can go in a shadow box with your Hardee's figures. The supply is finite - nobody's making California Raisins tin pins again, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.