We sat down with Charlie Schmidt who filmed the original Keyboard Cat video way back in 1984 his cat, Fatso. He later digitized the footage, uploaded the video to YouTube in 2007, and the rest is history.

You keep playing that keyboard, Fatso, wherever you are.

Some background on Keyboard Cat:

Keyboard Cat is the nickname given to an orange tabby cat named Fatso, filmed in the mid1980s by his owner, Charlie Schmidt. After the video went viral and the Fatso had passed, Schmidt adopted another cat named Bento, who took over the mantle of "Keyboard Cat" in media appearances.

The original VHS footage of Fatso was recorded by performance artist Charlie Schmidt in 1984. He put the cat in a shirt belonging to his son Cody and manipulated his paws to make the cat appear to be playing the keyboard. On June 7th, 2007, Schmidt uploaded the video to his YouTube channel, originally titled, "Cool Cat" where it sat in relative obscurity for another two years.

On February 2nd, 2009, YouTuber / blogger Brad O'Farrell posted a mashup video of a man falling down an escalator with Schmidt's cat, entitled "Play him off, Keyboard Cat." The idea of "playing someone off" came from the trope of "giving someone the hook" for a bad performance, a technique from Vaudeville shows. The original video has since been taken down from the original channel but has been reuploaded by other users. According to a report by The Guardian, the original video was in fact produced decades ago and the cat died in 1987.

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