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An orange cat in a blue baby T-shirt, propped up at a keyboard, "playing" a jaunty tune while an off-screen owner works its paws. Charlie Schmidt shot it on VHS in 1984, uploaded it in 2007, and in 2009 the internet decided that every fail video should end with him: play him off, Keyboard Cat.
A grey cat with a caption. In 2007, a website launched around a single image of a cat asking "I can has cheezburger?" — broken English, instant appeal, zero cynicism. Within months the site was pulling over a million hits a day, and a niche 4chan tradition became a phenomenon covered by Time magazine. Lolcats became the grammar of internet humor for a decade, the template for every image macro that followed.
Two disgraced fighter pilots, a jet built from scrapyard parts and a city of cats under attack from an undead sorcerer and a pair of robot gangsters. Hanna-Barbera's SWAT Kats was the top-rated syndicated cartoon of 1994 and then simply stopped, three episodes unfinished, which is why its fans have been trying to bring it back ever since.