In 1984, in Spokane, Washington, a bored Charlie Schmidt dressed his cat Fatso in a light blue infant’s shirt, sat him at an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, and worked the animal’s paws from below while a VHS camcorder rolled. Then the tape went into a drawer. Schmidt did not upload it to YouTube until June 2007, under the title Charlie Schmidt’s Cool Cat, and even then it drew little notice. The internet assumed the cat had died in 1987. Schmidt and his wife later corrected the record: Fatso, born in 1978, lived until about 1999, unaware of what was coming.

This episode traces how the clip became a fixture of online humor and then a legal test case. In early 2009, Brad O’Farrell of My Damn Channel got Schmidt’s permission and attached the cat to the end of a blooper, titling it Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat. It worked like a vaudeville hook for any public failure, and hundreds of versions followed by May. Schmidt then recast the role with new cats, signed commercial deals, and went to court over who may profit from a meme.

• Within months the joke reached The Daily Show, Ashton Kutcher’s million followers, and Andy Samberg’s MTV Movie Awards monologue. Weezer and Blink-182 used the footage to play themselves off stage.
• Schmidt adopted a lookalike named Bento, who debuted in Keyboard Cat Reincarnated in March 2010 and went on to star in a Wonderful Pistachios commercial. Skinny and then Presley later took over the blue shirt.
• Warner Music Group forced YouTube to mute a popular mashup that set the cat inside the Hall and Oates video for You Make My Dreams, igniting a debate over remix culture.
• In 2011 Schmidt sued Threadless over its Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt. Threadless countered that his copyright was registered only in September 2010, and the case settled by 2013.
• Schmidt and Nyan Cat creator Christopher Torres sued 5th Cell and Warner Brothers in 2013 for putting their characters in Scribblenauts without permission, and were paid in a settlement.