Lolcats

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This website is an archive. It ran from 2006-2010. Virtually everything on here is outdated or inaccurate.

A Caturday intro image from July 2, 2005, courtesy Macrochan

Proto-lolcats. When did lolcats begin? The memories of 4chan users trace "Caturday" back to early 2005, and I certainly remember these early floods. Most of the early "Caturday" images, though, were uninteresting, except for the obligatory "IT'S CATURDAY BITCHES" image that would be posted at the beginning of the thread. (Which reminds me, by the way, of "Guro Sunday", another old 4chan meme which apparently can be pinpointed even to summer 2004.) There were very few macros in the early Caturdays-- the funniest picture most weeks would Something Awful's Happycat (origin c. 2003-2004), and his trademark catchphrase "OH GOD HOW DID THIS GET HERE I AM NOT GOOD WITH COMPUTERS".

A Caturday intro image from June 20, 2006

Okay, so in that mess of a paragraph we were talking about 2005 Caturdays and how they weren't very funny. I would go so far as to say they were /b/'s soft side and used simply for images of cats, with little or no humor whatsoever. Perhaps lolcats simply evolved slowly out of that primordial ooze. If that's the case, though, where are our 2006 Caturday macros? Yes, even into 2006 the Caturday images on Macrochan are simply thread starters, without much comedy involved. There is the unique phenomenon of "Ceiling Cat," which was honored with its own Wikipedia article in March 2006, but he only gets response macros, not other kinds.

It's only as we get towards the summer of 2006 that our lovable feline friends have finally started doing unusual things. By July the "I'm in your ____" meme has been established. This is a Something Awful meme but I doubt they would want to take credit for such a badly Photoshopped image. In late August, I find the first original lolcat phrase on my hardrive. On October 30, 2006 we see Monorail Cat, first on 4chan then quickly spreading to other forums, and then of course by January 2007 all hell breaks loose.

So, is this the true origin date for lolcats: summer 2006? It's easy enough to say "case closed" at this point. But wait! On my hard drive, this image from 2004 survives:

An anomaly: a proto-invisible police car. I even remember how this was originally posted to /b/. I put the text and the image together myself, using the GIMP. Originally, the cat image stood alone, and the macro was written in the text field in full-width SJIS characters, like so:

ＵＮＭＡＲＫＥＤ　ＰＯＬＩＣＥ　ＣＡＲ

What does this mean? There is only one answer: lolcats can be traced back to Japan. Yes, to Japan we must go to find the origin of this enduring meme. Any investigation which does not include Japan is hopelessly incomplete!