Shortly after Brad O’Farrell married Mike Schmidt’s old footage with comically awkward clips of people making mistakes, hundreds of Keyboard Cat videos were made and viewed by millions on social media, the Los Angeles Times reported. Schmidt built a team of meme-makers around him to produce more cat videos, but there was only one problem: Fatso had long since died.
Around 2010, Schmidt picked up the second cat actor to play Keyboard Cat — another orange tabby named Bento. Schmidt made a new Keyboard Cat video — “Keyboard Cat REINCARNATED!” — but the concept remained much the same: Higher-res footage of Bento playing a new song with added rhythm and cutaways of his feet dancing. It was also around that same time that the Keyboard Cat brand diversified, adding merchandise and appearing in a Wonderful Pistachios TV ad, among other brand endorsements.
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All combined, Bento, Schmidt, and his team earned around $145,000 from Wonderful Pistachios alone, and the work didn’t stop there. With money involved, Schmidt protected his Keyboard Cat IP. When Keyboard Cat showed up in the video game “Scribblenauts,” he sued its publisher, Warner Bros., for copyright and trademark infringement. Representatives for Schmidt said settled “amicably,” New York Magazine reported.
But alas, Bento the Keyboard Cat 2.0 died from cancer in 2018. Schmidt paid tribute to Bento’s life in — what else? — a YouTube video. That year, another web-based cat celebrity, Grumpy Cat, shared their condolences for Schmidt’s on X, formerly Twitter. “Rest In Peace Keyboard Cat Bento,” Grumpy Cat said.
