When I was a kid, I spent most of my online time on a website called Scratch. Originally a place for sharing things made with a simple kids' programming language, it quickly became a child social network, and fostered many a child fandom. I was one of the many children who read the Warriors book series and posted about it on Scratch. I didn't want to bother digging through the site itself to find the actual Warriors animations I watched as a child, so I pulled what seemed like appropriately iconic and violent ones from YouTube to stand as symbols. (My secret is I never watched any of these as a kid. The only YouTube Warriors content I liked were sad Bluestar animations and tributes to Fireheart and Graystripe's "friendship.")
As for the song itself, it's also connected to Scratch for me. Popcorn (one of the songs used in this mashup) was one of my absolute favorite songs as a kid, entirely because I heard it in a Scratch project once. Despite this video not using any Scratch footage, it's a sort of tribute to my time on the site in 2009.
Why the real life footage, you ask? Well one, for variety. And two...just look at them. This is what I imagined while reading, personally, not so much the anime cat battles. But I have genuine great respect for the kids who put their whole heart into animating Tigerstar exploding in a shower of red, and I salute them with this video.