Grumpy Cat: The Face That Launched a Legal Department

The cat’s name was Tardar Sauce. She was born in Arizona in 2012, she was small, and she had a form of feline dwarfism together with an underbite that pulled the corners of her mouth into a permanent expression of profound disappointment in the entire arrangement.

She was not actually grumpy. Every account from the people around her describes a placid, friendly animal. The face was structural. That fact does nothing to reduce the power of the face.

The Photograph That Did It

In September 2012 her owner’s brother posted a picture of her to Reddit. Within days the internet had decided this was the most important cat alive. Commenters accused the family of editing the photo, which prompted a video, which spread even faster, because the expression turned out to hold at every angle and in motion.

Why it’s weird: the meme required no caption to work. Most image macros need text to land the joke. Tardar Sauce simply looked at the camera and communicated a complete emotional position that everybody recognised, which is why she translated across every language on earth without modification.

Then Came the Business

What separates Grumpy Cat from every other viral animal is what happened next, which was a properly run commercial operation. Books. A licensed coffee drink. A film. A wax figure at Madame Tussauds. Appearances with agents and schedules. Her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, left her job as a waitress within months.

Reports of the fortune involved got wildly inflated at one point, and the family publicly denied the largest figures. The real number was never a hundred million dollars. It was, however, enough to change a family’s life completely on the basis of an underbite.

The Lawsuit Is the Best Part

In 2018 the operation went to court against a beverage company over a licensing agreement. The deal had covered an iced coffee product called the Grumppuccino. The company, in the view of the court, had gone beyond the agreed scope of the licence with additional products.

A federal jury awarded the cat’s company roughly $710,000. Read the sentence again. A jury in the United States sat through a trial, deliberated, and awarded three quarters of a million dollars in a dispute over the commercial rights to a cat’s facial expression. The court reporters that week earned their money.

She Was Well Looked After

Worth saying, because the internet is bad at this. The obvious worry with a monetised animal is the animal. By every available account Tardar Sauce travelled with limits on her appearances, had a handler whose job was to remove her from crowds, and spent most of her life at home doing nothing in particular. Nobody covering her ever came away with a story about mistreatment, and plenty of people looked.

The End

She died in May 2019, aged seven, from complications following an infection. The announcement came from the family on her own social accounts, and the reaction was the same one Doge got five years later: a large number of adults quietly upset about an animal they had never met.

There is a decent argument that Grumpy Cat was the last of a specific era. She arrived when a single image could still take over the whole internet at once, before the feeds split into a thousand separate rooms. Nothing has been that universally recognised since.

Our advice, unchanged since 2015: your cat also has a face. Point a camera at it. The odds are terrible and the upside is a legal department.