Grumpy Cat, the frowning feline who made the jump from an internet celebrity to a global pop culture icon, died on Tuesday while battling complications stemming from a urinary tract infection, according to her family’s statement released on Friday. She was 7.
"Grumpy Cat has helped millions of people smile all around the world," Grumpy Cat's family wrote in the announcement of her death on Twitter. "Her spirit will continue to live on through her fans everywhere."
Some days are grumpier than others… pic.twitter.com/ws209VWl97
— Grumpy Cat (@RealGrumpyCat) May 17, 2019
Born to the name Tardar Sauce, Grumpy Cat came to this world on April 4th, 2012 to her caretaker, Tabatha Bundesen, in Morristown, Arizona. Just five months later, the cat skyrocketed to worldwide internet fame after Bundesen’s brother Bryan shared a picture of her to Reddit’s /r/pics community in September. "Meet grumpy cat," the title of the post proclaimed. The world was more than happy to oblige.
This one Reddit post opened the Internet to an array of photoshops, parodies and image macros, with people all over the world celebrating Tardar Sauce's unique disposition. Within a year, Grumpy Cat had become the Internet's most popular memes. In 2013, the public voted her to a landslide victory against "Harlem Shake,""Gangnam Style" and Yelling Goat for Meme of the Year at the 17th Annual Webby Awards.
Debuting at a time when cats with bad grammar had been reigning supreme over the memescape for nearly a decade, Grumpy Cat arrived onto the scene as the born-ready mascot for many of those who felt that LOLcats and Advice Animal memes were getting too stale. Unlike her predecessors that went viral, Grumpy Cat didn’t say “nyao” or “do not want,” but a terse “NO.” And with her firm “NO,” she wrote a new chapter of cat memes for this decade.
But Grumpy Cat’s greatest legacy in meme culture is the ways in which the cat and her owner leveraged her 15 minutes of viral fame into a lasting brand and a commercial enterprise. In the following years, Grumpy Cat’s fame grew into one of the most successful and profitable meme enterprises of all time, earning more than $100 million, at least according to one disputed 2014 report. With appearances in commercials, on magazine covers, best-seller lists and even her own movie, Lifetime's Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, it's hard to argue Grumpy Cat's popularity, which transcended the computer and smartphone screens that made her famous.
Grumpy Cat's trademark mouth may have given off the impression of discomfort, but her famous face was caused by feline dwarfism, rather than perpetual disdain.
"Some days are grumpier than others," her family wrote on Twitter. For the Internet, and Grumpy Cat's legion of fans for whom she represented a specific era in memedom, today may be one of the grumpiest.