Remarkably, he found one.
Inside Edition reported that the shirt cost just $7.
Wearing the second-hand uniform immediately made him look much more official. The group reportedly took the disguise even further, with Maravilla presenting himself as someone involved with the restaurant’s interior décor.
The objective was simple: act confidently enough that nobody would question what they were doing.
On July 13, 2018, they put their plan into action.
With help from friends, they brought the enormous poster into the Pearland restaurant.
Maravilla wore the McDonald’s shirt.
Then they installed their homemade advertisement on the previously empty wall.
No alarm sounded.
No employee immediately ordered them to take it down.
Nobody apparently realized that the polished-looking poster had not been supplied by McDonald’s at all.
The friends left.
Now there was only one question.
How long would it remain there?
They might reasonably have expected someone to notice within hours.
Perhaps a manager would arrive the next morning and wonder where the new advertisement had come from.
Maybe a regional employee would recognize that it was not part of an approved marketing campaign.
Instead, something much funnier happened.
Nothing.
Day After Day, Nobody Took It Down
The poster stayed exactly where they had placed it.
Customers walked past it.
Employees worked beneath it.
People ate their meals while Maravilla and Toledo smiled down from the enormous image on the wall.
Days became weeks.
Still, the poster remained.
On September 3, Maravilla finally revealed the prank publicly.
By then, 51 days had passed since the poster had been installed.
He posted photographs on Twitter explaining that he had noticed a blank wall at McDonald’s and decided to create a fake poster featuring himself and his friend.
After 51 days, he wrote, it was still hanging there.
That distinction is important: contrary to some later retellings, the restaurant did not necessarily “discover” the poster on the 51st day. Fifty-one days was how long it had been hanging when Maravilla publicly revealed what they had done.
And once the internet discovered the story, anonymity disappeared very quickly.
The post exploded across social media.
News organizations began contacting the friends.
Within a short period, what had been a private joke inside one Texas McDonald’s became an international human-interest story.
Later reporting from the University of Houston’s student newspaper said the social-media post eventually reached approximately one million likes and more than 250,000 retweets.
But people were responding to more than the audacity of the prank.
They were also responding to the reason behind it.
“Representation Matters”
For Maravilla and Toledo, the joke had always contained a larger point.
They wanted Asian customers to be visible.
Speaking to CNN at the time, Maravilla expressed hope that the attention would encourage not only McDonald’s but other major companies to embrace people from different ethnic backgrounds in their advertising.
That message was particularly relevant in 2018.