If your only exposure to the experience of listening to dried fruit sing Christmas carols comes from the Simpsons episode where the family watches the “California Prunes” sing “O Pruney Night” (which happens to be “offensive to Christians and prunes”), then you may not be old enough to remember 1987’s A Claymation Christmas Celebration, which included a guest appearance from then-popular pitchmen … er, fruit … the California Raisins.
The animated singing group was created for a series of commercials by the California Raisin Advisory Board to make sure their wrinkled crop was ingrained in consumer consciousness … and boy, was it. The Raisins developed a product omnipresence that would make Coca-Cola envious, appearing in TV specials and an animated series, and cutting some albums. As with real raisins themselves, you either loved these guys, didn’t really acknowledge them, or were flat-out sickened by them.
They appear in this Christmas special along with other Claymation creations (if talking raisins are too mundane for you, the program features, among others, ice-dancing walruses and be-bopping camels) from Will Vinton, who won an Emmy for the program. No word on whether the show helped raisins replace more traditional holiday fruits that Christmas season, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The California Date Administrative Committee and the California Fig Advisory Board simply had no answer for this marketing powerhouse.
