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Street Roots • March 13-19; 2015
News
Multimedia artist Charlie Schmidt imitating his famous “Keyboard C at” video that went from an online to commercial sensation.
BY VICKY CARROLL
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
buTübe’s 2014 list of most-watched
clips featured not one single cat
video — in fact, it was topped by a
dog dressed as a spider. Have we reached
peak-cat? As Grumpy Cat would say’ NO.
It’s simply spreading offline.
A book of erudite essays on the
phenomenon of cat videos, “Cat is Art
Spelled Wrong,” will be published later this
year, after a Kickstarter campaign,
“Catstarter,” exceeded its $25,000 goal by
$9,000. Before that, the first-ever Cat-Con
— “like Comic-Con but for cat people” —
will be held in Los Angeles, starring
celebrities of the online feline world,
alongside merchandise stalls and all things
Keyboard Cat,
cat pop culture. All of this follows hot on
the paws of thé resoundingly successful,
Grumpy C at and their
internationally touring Internet Cat Video
Festival, which caters to like-minded
fellow felines have been
people who joyfully sacrifice hours of their
sensations online. Now,
lives to watching web clips of cats falling
off tilings, climbing into things and chasing
these apparently
things.
Even if by some freak of negligent web
irresistible cat videos are
browsing you have never encountered cat-
vid superstars Lil Bub, Princess Monster
moving offline, with
Truck or Keyboard Cat, it can’t be possible
that you’ve missed Grumpy C at The kitty
festivals around the globe
meme-queen’s feline pout has garnered her
celebrating this new
owner, Tabatha Bundesen, almost $100
million, since the former waitress posted
realm o f art.
photos of the tiny Tardar Sauce (Grumpy’s
real name) to Reddit in 2012. Barely three
years later, there is an insatiable appetite
for merchandise, a film, books in 57
Janj^agqSj a Grumppuccino iced-coffee
■
GRAZE
range and a marketing deal with Friskies
cat food. She has 7 million Facebook
“likes.” And she’s just the tip of the furry
icebergs
At its root is Keyboard Cat. This grainy
old Betacam footage of ginger tabby Fatso
in a blue shirt plunking out a tinny tune on
a keyboard was uploaded to the web
around 2006 and lurked there for a couple
of years before going viral in 2009. Fatso is
now long gone, but Keyboard Cat is bigger
than death; the film’s creator, artist
Charlie Schmidt, reincarnated him in the
form of Bento, another ginger tom who
likes to tickle the ivories. He was featured
in one of the eye-watering-priced
commercials during the Super Bowl last
month. Thirty seconds of airtime costs
about $4.5 million, Schmidt says. “We were
on for about two seconds.”
Keyboard Cat was recently featured in a
Russian ad for Snickers, on Cartoon
Network in South America, and in a Delta
Air Lines passenger safety information
film. But Schmidt,, who trained as an artist
and remains a painter and video-maker,
insists there’s no grand plan or cynical
intent to cash in; it’s all part of the random
nature of the cosmos, mirrored in the
equally unpredictable, untamable nature of
the Internet.
“I was making weird videos long before
the cat. I was a painter, and still am. But
most people are just interested in the cat,”
he says. In 1984, he was making home
videos with “a lot of impact and not much
polish,” doing little illustrations and films
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