After decades, she finally gets a face-lift

Based on a real person, the Sun Maid icon has stood the test of time.
By TANYA BARRIENTOS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
We all know her. Her long, dark hair. Her big, red bonnet. It's the famous Sun Maid raisin girl.
For 90 years, she's been sitting quietly in our lunch boxes and in our pantries, alongside the Quaker Oats man, the Peter Pan peanut butter boy, Uncle Ben, and Tony the Tiger.
Pretty. Silent. SM has smiled kindly at us, even when we've heartlessly traded her off for a more decadent Little Debbie in the school cafeteria. A real class act.
But now, for the first time in her very long life, the beauty on the box has been granted a Pilates body, an aerobics instructor's voice, and a 30-second television spot to launch her new career as a company spokescharacter.
Introduced last month, the 21st-century version of the raisin queen is a true digital dollface, tanned and toned and unmistakably going for the big-eyed Barbie, Shrek-girl, Disney-princess look. Think Sandra Bullock made of pixels, and you get the picture.
In her 30-second commercial, SM walks through a verdant valley (looking pretty darned bountiful herself in her tight, white peasant blouse) and in a vaguely seductive tone tells us that raisins are "nothing but grapes and sunshine."
Mark Bagley, senior vice president for sales and marketing at Sun Maid, says the company spent about $8 million transforming their spokesgal into the computer graphic, with hopes of "really capitalizing on the iconic value of her image."
Until now, Bagley says, she has only been pictured on the front of packages. She has never actually sold the raisins inside.
In other words, after 90 years of getting by on just her looks, SM has to start earning her keep.
Unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy or even Betty Crocker, the Sun Maid image is based on a real person -- Lorraine Collett Petersen, a California girl who volunteered to hand out boxes of raisins at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Petersen was asked to pose with a tray of grapes for a painting that became the company's logo in 1916.
Features adjusted
The image was updated in 1970, when the Sun Maid's decidedly ethnic features were smoothed out and her torso was slenderized. Bagley says that 1970 image will remain on all of the company's packaging, but the new, digital SM will star in the television commercials and will appear on the company Web site, www.sunmaid.com).
Giving the raisin gal a pair of working gams, blinking eyes, and a real voice wasn't an easy decision for the suits at Sun Maid.
"We began doing research about a year ago to see how the Sun Maid coming to life would resonate with consumers," Bagley says.
(Would you stop eating raisins forever if her head moved? Mark "A" for "yes," "B" for "no," and "C" if you're just taking this survey to get a free box of raisins.)
Bagley says once the executives felt comfortable with the idea of a malleable SM, "we had to decide: Would we use a real actress? Could we find someone who looked exactly like the painting?
"We rapidly came to the conclusion that with animation, we could control every element," he says.
Diana Walczak, co-founder of Synthespian Studios, the computer graphics company in Massachusetts that was responsible for SM's makeover, spent months developing storyboards for the new character.
"We decided to keep her in her environment, which is the vineyard, and to get her to tell us the message that raisins are grapes transformed by the magic of the sun," Walczak says.
Dostoyevsky it's not, but the raisin people like it.
Walczak admits the animated SM does look a lot like her big-screen princess counterparts, but adds that the target market for the ads are women between 25 and 44 with children ages 3 to 13 -- the prime Disney princess years.
So what does Lanahan, the character builder, think of the new Sun Maid's debut performance?
"In a way this one feels like a teaser," he says. "Now I want to know more. It looks like she lives in the valley of the Green Giant. My question is, what happens next?"
Watch the Sun Maid television ad at http://www.sunmaid.com/about/play_animation.html.