Print your own MAPO stickers, declare your goods to be of bespoke Disney manufacture


FoxxFur at Passport to Dreams Old and New has created a PDF template for printing out your own MAPO stickers. MAPO (MAry POppins) is the Disney division responsible for fabricating many of the limited and one-off mechanisms and infrastructural gubbins that make up the Disney Parks' underpinnings, and each of their products ships with a MAPO sticker proclaiming its origin. These stickers are highly sought-after souvenirs, especially among cast-members (employees) at the parks. FoxxFur's template can be used to produce your own stickers and add them to things that need a little exotic back-story.

MAPO manufactured basically everything that ended up in Disneyland or Walt Disney World between 1964 and 1990 – they must have printed these things out by a thousands because they're stuck to props, motors, figures, power junction boxes, chain lifts and practically everything else you can think of in the World's Fair attractions, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain, Horizons, and dozens of others.

As you can imagine, MAPO stickers are prized possessions amongst cast members, who are apt to peel the nearest one off the first available prop. The backstages of Mansion and Pirates are full of tiny rectangles of less-aged areas where MAPO stickers have absconded the premises. Here's mine. It's direct off the actuator frame for Herbert Hoover, which was being thrown away:

The problem is that as time goes by and the gap between the shuttering of MAPO and our own age widens, these stickers are becoming increasingly uncommon and most of the good ones have already been thrown out – attached to props in, say, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride – or gone home with Cast Members with an eye for history. This is problematic in that these stickers represent Disney history – Disney history that's vanishing out the Utilidor exit year by year.

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