Disney movies have made celebrities of actors ranging from Hayden Panettiere to Demi Lovato. The next breakout star might be a Xerox Corp. 5028 copier.

Buried deep in Building 200 at Xerox’s Webster campus, the company’s archives are a treasure trove of all things Xerox, from old equipment to decades of marketing materials to such memorabilia as a collection of company mugs to the Olympic torch then-CEO Anne Mulcahy carried in 2002 for a stretch in Connecticut as it made its way to Salt Lake City.

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The collections serve multiple functions, with company attorneys often consulting its complete collection of every equipment manual of every machine Xerox ever put out as they handle intellectual property protection and litigation, and movie and television production companies sometimes borrowing machines as props.

Hence the 5028 copier, one of Xerox’s 50 series of copiers from the mid-1980s being borrowed by Disney for a film set then, said Ray Brewer, Xerox archivist.

“We have a machine on the set of Mad Men,” Brewer said. “The Carrie Diaries, we have a machine down there now. We’ve sent a few machines out during the past year for short terms for AMC channel for some documentaries they were doing.

“There was a commercial on last year, the whole premise is the guy walks into the office. His name is Dave. He’s got the red hair, the red beard. And there’s someone at the reception desk, its his clone, y’know, it’s ‘Morning, Dave,’ ‘Hi, Dave.’ And there’s a Xerox tech rep working on a machine, I recognized the machine right off, and he walks by. It was something about ‘Don’t you wish you could clone yourself to run your entire office?’ type of thing. But as soon as he walked by the machine, I was ‘Ohhhh …’ That was kinda cool.”

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