The California Raisins

Invented by the Will Vinton Studios for a 1986 California Raisin Advisory Board commercial, their popularity inexplicably skyrocketed and they appeared in the CBS TV specials: The Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987), Meet the Raisins (1988), and The Raisins: Sold Out (1990). They actually had an animated Saturday morning kids show in 1989. Not claymation, but even more inexplicably, regular cel animation. Members are AC, Bebop, Red and Stretch, and their manager, Rudy. The California Raisins were accepted to the Smithsonian Institute in 1991, one of the biblical signs of the apocalypse, I believe.