We’re saying goodbye to a legend today.
Earlier this month, Maru the cat, one of web culture’s most beloved cats, departed this life.
YouTube cat fans and cardboard boxes will never be the same.
He was 18 years old, and his human said he’d been diagnosed recently with cancer.
Maru was one of the best known and best loved online cats, in the days when a huge part of online culture revolved around unusual cats.
But he seemed to take his fame in stride; no matter how many subscribers he had or how many people liked his content, Maru did it all Maru’s way.
He was born in Japan in 2007, a Scottish fold cat whose name means “round.”
His human roommate (she preferred not to call herself his “owner”) started posting some videos of the little guy for fun.
One of those videos, from October 2008, made the cat go viral.
It shows Maru running, sliding and pouncing over and over to get inside cardboard boxes, all of which are way too small to hold his floof.
This was catnip to users of the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that would be big cultural destinations online for the next decade.
And a lot of that culture was centered around cats: in addition to Maru, there was Grumpy Cat, Business Cat, Lil Bub, Keyboard Cat and lots of others.
Guinness later gave Maru a world record for having the most YouTube views of any animal on the platform – hundreds of millions of views!
There was eventually a book, I Am Maru, and two cat siblings, Hana and Miri.
Over time internet culture changed: it got louder, more raucous, more showy and often more unpleasant.
But the videos on Maru’s channel didn’t change; they stayed slow, and calm and sweet and funny.
And, of course, they were full of boxes for this well-loved internet cat to try to squeeze into.
Today in 2015, a news report about an unusual situation in Watson, Louisiana.
Jake Williams drove his truck and horse trailer to a daiquiri shop, but when he left the place, he realized he was in no condition to drive that truck home.
So he got on the horse, named Sugar, and started riding home.
As he told a reporter later, “It’s safer that way. The horse knows the way home.”
Still, he did get a ticket and a relative eventually had to pick him up.
The World Will Always Remember Maru (Neatorama)
Drunk cowboy: ‘Horse knows the way home’ (WBRZ)
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Screenshot by mugumogu