About
On October 13 2009, YouTube user Rozzzafly uploaded a video of a kitten being tickled. When the tickling stopped, the kitten threw up its paws in surprise. Within two weeks, the video had 7,000,000 views. As of August 2010, it has over 29,800,000 views.
Origin
According to Canada’s The Star and French newspaper LePost.fr, the kitten is named Attila Fluff. At the time, she was between 6 and 10 weeks old. According to Rozzzafly’s mom, the kitten is “independent, aggressive, and … a big ball of fur” (The Star).
Spread
In November 2009, it was uploaded to College Humor and posted on sites including BoingBoing, Urlesque, Dlisted, Cute Overload, and submitted to Reddit, where it recieved 1886 up-votes and 226 comments.
On December 2, 2009, Ray William Johnson included Surprised Kitty in that day’s episode. The segment is at :35. That same day, ABC News showed the video on their broadcast:
On December 3, 2009, SurprisedKitty.com was created, with an embed of the original video.
Tosh.0 reenacted it in January 2010, in which Tosh put on cat ears and whiskers and reenacted the video.
Derivatives
Reaction video (November 2009) 143,000+ views
Surprised Human (December 2009) 2,000,000+ views
Kitty watching Surprised Kitty (December 2009) 398,000+ views
Surprised girl with cat ears (December 2009) 397,000+ views
Evil Surprised Kitty (December 2009) 383,000+ views
Somewhat Surprised Kitty (December 2009) 367,000+ views
Similarly Surprised Kitty (December 2009) 359,000+ views
Another surprised human (December 2009) 28,000+ views
OkGo’s Surprised Dog (January 2010) 1,000,000+ views