A cat that had been dead for more than twenty years became one of the most recognized faces on the internet. Fatso never saw a computer screen and never heard of YouTube. Yet millions of people know that orange tabby in a tiny blue shirt, bouncing its paws across a keyboard. The strangest part is how long it took anyone to notice.
1984: a bored artist and his cat
It started in 1984 in Spokane, Washington. Charlie Schmidt, a local performance artist, was bored. He had a cat named Fatso, a keyboard that could store a tune, a tripod and a camera.
He dressed Fatso in a newborn T-shirt, sat behind the cat and moved the paws himself. The shirt hid his hands. He wrote the bouncy little song in about two minutes. Schmidt later said he was not aiming for anything except relieving his boredom.
Fatso had joined the family as a small kitten, along with a sister named Skinny. One had long fur and one had short fur, so the names stuck. Fatso died in 1987, and the tape went on a shelf.
2007: an upload almost nobody saw
The clip almost did not survive. Years later, Schmidt noticed his old tapes were wearing out, so he turned them into digital files. In June 2007, he uploaded the clip to YouTube. For almost two years, very little happened.
2009: “Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat”
On February 2, 2009, Brad O’Farrell, a 22-year-old who worked for a video website, got Schmidt’s permission to use the footage. He attached it to the end of a clip showing a man in a wheelchair tumbling down an escalator and called it Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat.
The idea came from old vaudeville shows, where a performer who bombed got pulled offstage with a hook. Fatso became that hook.
O’Farrell also convinced Schmidt to let anyone use the footage, and that one decision made the joke spread. Within three days his channel was pulling 10,000 to 30,000 views a day, and people started attaching Fatso to every failed stunt they could find.
Prime time
On May 18, 2009, the joke reached national television. On The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert worried he would slip up and get played off by the cat. He stumbled over a line, and Keyboard Cat played him off. At the MTV Movie Awards that same year, Andy Samberg warned winners that long speeches would get the same treatment.
Fame brings a lawsuit
Other companies started using the cat. In May 2013, Schmidt and the creator of Nyan Cat sued Warner Bros. and game studio 5th Cell, saying both characters appeared in the Scribblenauts video games without permission. The case settled in September 2013, and both creators were paid.
Bento, and Keyboard Cat 3.0
Schmidt also faced a bigger issue: his star had died decades earlier. In 2010, he adopted a shelter cat named Bento, an orange tabby who looked almost exactly like Fatso. Three days after coming home, Bento filmed his first Keyboard Cat video, and he went on to appear in a Wonderful Pistachios commercial during the 2010 World Series.
Bento died of liver cancer on March 8, 2018. Messages arrived from around the world. Even Grumpy Cat’s account posted condolences.
In March 2019, Schmidt introduced Keyboard Cat 3.0, a cat named Skinny, after Fatso’s sister. Skinny made a first public appearance in June 2019 in Spokane, posing for selfies with fans in exchange for donations to a local food bank.
Keyboard Cat timeline
- 1984 Fatso is filmed in Spokane
- 1987 Fatso dies
- June 2007 The clip is uploaded to YouTube
- Feb 2, 2009 “Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat” goes viral
- 2010 Bento takes over the keys
- 2019 Skinny becomes Keyboard Cat 3.0
The takeaway
The original clip of Fatso has now passed 80 million views, all from a video made to kill time on a boring day in 1984.
