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 One of the internet's favourite animal heroes, Keyboard Cat, has sadly passed away. 
 
 Though not the original Keyboard Cat, Bento was the second feline star associated with one of the most famous meme videos of the last decade. He reached nine years of age, and died on March 9, 2018. 
 
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 Owner Charlie Schmidt posted a rather epic tribute to his feline friend, Bento, on YouTube on Sunday, based on one of his videos from 2014: 
 
 "Keyboard Cat" originally found fame in 2007, thanks to some quirky old VHS footage shot in 1984 by American performance artist Charlie Schmidt. Not starring Bento just yet, the original clip starred Schmidt's other cat, Fatso (who died in 1987), wearing a blue shirt and "playing" an electronic keyboard. 
 
 In June 2007, the video was posted to YouTube by Schmidt. In 2009, YouTuber Brad O'Farrell gained permission to use the clip in a mashup fail video, and this spurred thousands of spoofs over the last ten years — there's a whole website of them. 
 
 Here's the OG, with Fatso, which currently has over 50 million views: 
 
 After Fatso, Schmidt's new cat Bento took up the reins and became the new Keyboard Cat in 2010: 
 
 This commercial for Wonderful Pistachios for the 2010 Major League Baseball World Series is a career highlight for Bento: 
 
 Folks on Twitter expressed their deepest sympathies, when they weren't being confused over whether Bento was the OG Keyboard Cat or not. 
 
 You were one of the OG cats and you made me giggle so fucking hard when I was like 6. Rest easy you silly kitty #KeyboardCat pic.twitter.com/VVXYAhi0LV — 🅱️olin (@colinjamese) March 18, 2018 
 
 So I wake up this morning thinking it was going to be good and then I find out that the keyboard cat died 😭😭😭😭😭 — lil mowgs (@confident_mowgs) March 18, 2018 
 
 Vale Bento, we'll be cranking up the synths tonight.
– An online memento to Bento is how many fans found out some sad news late last week about one of the internet's most famous cats. People reports that a six-minute tribute to the renowned "Keyboard Cat" was posted Friday, announcing the musically inclined feline's death on March 8 at the age of 8. Although the YouTube star, owned by Charles Schmidt, wasn't the original Keyboard Cat—that honor goes to Schmidt's previous orange tabby, Fatso, who died in 1987, per Mashable—Bento took over the ivories in 2010, posting videos on the Keyboard Cat YouTube channel and even landing a Wonderful Pistachios commercial. So how did Fatso, who died long before the internet had infiltrated nearly every household, become an online sensation in the first place? Schmidt had in his archives a 1984 VHS tape of Fatso "playing" the keyboards, and that footage wound up on YouTube in 2007. The clip eventually went viral. Comments underneath the YouTube tribute to Bento offer condolences to Schmidt and lament the loss of an epic online star. "[I'm] more sad about this than Hawking," one particularly broken-up fan writes. Others are holding tight to the memories: "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it [happened]." (These YouTube stars awoke to a horrifying ordeal.)