Sometimes, one definitive masterpiece is all that a true artist needs. In the world of punk rock, The Sex Pistols never really recorded a proper follow up to 1977’s Never Mind The Bollocks, so that LP stands alone in their discography. And industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey has but one narrative feature movie to his credit: 1962’s Carnival Of Souls. So it is with actor Ron Livingston and YouTube viral videos. The actor, probably still best known as slacker Peter Gibbons in Mike Judge’s Office Space, has a YouTube channel of his own, brilliantly called Livingstown. Said channel boasts exactly one upload: a 27-second-long clip from 2010 entitled “Keyboard Cat Redux.”
Donning cat ears and a shapeless blue shirt, all while nimbly manipulating fuzzy little puppet arms through the puffy sleeves of the garment, the Band Of Brothers star pretends to play a brief but jaunty keyboard solo. All of this, naturally, is in imitation of one of the most-famous, most-seen videos in internet history, “Charlie Schmidt’s Keyboard Cat.” Why he did this remains unknown, but he uses the description section to plug the 2013 comedy The Sidekick, in which he appeared as Captain Wonder. Livingston has put a surprising amount of thought into getting the little details right, including the framing of the video and even the facial expressions of Keyboard Cat itself. A side-by-side comparison shows that the actor’s efforts were not in vain.
This viral video triumph for Livingston has been a long time in coming. The original “Keyboard Cat” video dates back to at least 2007 and uses footage that was shot in 1984. Livingston’s faithful recreation was posted in 2010, but it was only recently rediscovered by Reddit. Now it belongs to the world. In retrospect, this seems like the kind of thing that Livingston’s Office Space character would have been doing in his apartment when he was taking time away from his duties at Initech.
[via The Daily Dot]