Cats vs. Printers

About

Cat Vs. Printer is a video fad showing cats often-exciteable reactions to printers. Many of these videos show the cat attacking the paper as it comes out of the machine.

Origin

The first known video depicting a cat fighting with a printer was uploaded to YouTube on April 23rd, 2006 by Azahara Carreras León. The video depicts her cat Marcus attacking a HP Deskjet printer as it prints, violently ripping up the paper. As of June 2013, the video has been viewed more than 1.8 million times.

Spread

Two days after León's video was uploaded, YouTuber choucrouto uploaded a video depicting an orange cat reaching in to a printer as it prints. In the later half of 2006, León's video was posted on VideoSift^[1] and the personal blogs Life of 7 Cats^[2] and Nothing To Do With Arbroath.^[3] In 2007, the video was reuploaded to YouTube dozens of times and featured on Clip A Day^[4], Maniac World^[5], Dailymotion^[6] and Break.^[7] In 2008, a number of new cat vs. printer videos were uploaded to YouTube, most notably Paperinjerate's Pussy versus Printer (shown below, left), uploaded on September 5th, 2008. Featuring added sound effects as the cat hits the printer, this video has been viewed more than 7.2 million times as of June 2013.

Another cat vs. printer went viral in April 2009^[9] (shown above, right) and that July, Urlesque^[10] posted the first compilation of these videos. Between 2010 and 2012, cat vs. printer videos were featured on Animal Planet^[11], Buzzfeed^[12], Viral Viral Videos^[13], Catsparella^[14], the Guardian^[15], the Huffington Post^[16], College Humor^[17], eBaum's World^[18] and Boing Boing.^[19] In December 2012, YouTuber mihaifrancu uploaded a two-minute compilation video (shown below) of cats attacking printers.

Notable Videos

As of June 2013, there are more than 169,000 search results on YouTube for "cat printer"^[8], but a number of these are reuploads.

Search Interest

External References