The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your two old masters of my new show. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Ogle. And folks, I hope you had some coffee, because we're liable to put you to sleep with the exceedingly chill vibes in this episode. That's because we are talking about the patron saint of PBS, the Buddha of the brush, the Confucius of the canvas, key of happy trees and fluffy clouds, and if you don't like him, we'll beat you just like he beats his brushes. I'm talking about Mr Bob Ross and the joy of painting. That is an all time intro from you, Jordan. You're fired up, but he deserves it. He is one of my all time favorites, one of my few sources of joy in this god forsaken world. I love him so much. The website Motherboard has described him as quote the end to the Internet hate machines Yang preaching the wonders of natural beauty and artistic encouragement, a seemingly limitless belief in each and every one of us that we could all create something beautiful. And you know what, if we stumble along the way, that's just fine, because, as Bob would say, we don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents. The show, it's It's it's televisual ambient. I never missed it when it was on as a kid. What was your relationship like with the joint painting? I am ashamed to admit that I came to it late in life. I was a Mr. Rogers kid, not mutually exclusive, but I understand no. But then, like basically, once I got into The Simpsons, that was it. It was Simpsons, nothing but Simpson's, nothing but Simpson. He must have been on the Simpsons at some point, I know, I family guy probably yea. Yeah, painting regards, I got into the let's paint and jog. Yeah, let's paint and make blended fruit drinks like that was when I was in college. I did spend some time, like during my um my lost years as a marijuana addict, I did spend some time with Mr Ross, but I never painted. I'd never know, as we'll find out. I think something like between three and five of viewers actually painted along with it. The rest just watched and have it on and zend out well. Bob has been back in the zike ice in recent years, thanks in large part to a marathon on the video streaming platform t which and the two hundred hour event pulled in more than five million viewers, which was enough to convince the powers that be at Twitch to make it a regular event, and since then he's been a hit on Netflix and YouTube, where his channel has racked up close to a billion views. And in a way, it makes sense that Bob Ross would translate well to the streaming age, considering he's basedly an early vlogger. He speaks directly to the camera, foraging a close intimate connection with the viewer, talking to them as if they were his friend. His painting lessons are basically the fore runners of YouTube how to videos, with Bob's own unique brand of positivity thrown in. He's recording it in a stripped down TV set not dissimilar to d I Y YouTuber studios and suburban basements, and he was also a pioneer of the instant internet hack cute animals Bob Ross was famous for bringing baby squirrels, notably the adorable peepod onto the program, and of course we can't forget how Bob is the king of SMR, the blissed out translike head tingles phenomenon that occupies its own special subsection of the Internet. Bob Ross is where the ven diagram of vlogging, how two's a s MR and cute animals becomes a circle? Uh, all wrapped up in this idiosyncratic package of hilariously dated new wave platitudes and style, but still deeply heartfelt words of encouragement. Are you what's your a s m R? Take Jordan's Oh, but this was the show that taught me that I had a SMR. Yeah, I would watch this and zone out, not know I mean SMRs we'll talk about as a fairly new label. Yeah, I think I don't really think I get it. I like drone music and like white noise. You know. I have sleep machine with kids, so like anything that's just just like whether it's like synthesizers or guitar, like, that's what I'm into. I used to have. I had a Magic set as a kid, and it had like a fifteen minute instructional vhs that came with he would just put that. I would I would just put that on and they would do card tricks and they would show you up close how to do and I was would just be transfixed by and then we get to the end. I rewind it over and over again and it would just completely chill me out. And you know, this is close to our fiftie episode of listeners might know. I know I need to be chilled out on occasion. So mine is like mineus like Japanese ambient from the eighties, just like yeah, like soft synth sounds and like water burbling. But Bob Ross, as we'll find out, wasn't always the king of chill. You'll hear about his rough and ready days as a loudmouth sergeant in the Air Force, his vicious feud with his painting mentor, his bizarre connection to the CIA, the mysterious reason you can't actually buy one of his paintings, and the really quite bitter legal wranglings that continued in the wake of his death. Here is everything you didn't know about Bob Ross and the joy of painting. When Bob Ross was a kid growing up in Florida, he nursed an injured alligator back to health in the family bathtub. He also took in numerous other animals, including armadillos, squirrels, and snakes. One time, a snake got loose in the house and was missing for days, only to be discovered in the middle of the night when his mother took a trip to the bathroom. I shared this story first merely to set the tone. This is the type of man we're dealing with. As with many soft spoken people, Bob Ross is exceedingly chill. Nature was a response to a somewhat tumultuous upbringing. He was born in two to a carpenter named Jack Ross and his wife Ali, who worked as a waitress. They divorced when Bob was a kid, married other people, his mom and a half brother with a new husband. Then Bob's divorced parents split from their spouses and remarried each other, all while Bob was in his teens. How many Christmas is is that? I? Yeah, so that's confusing, um. And I'm fairly certain that Bob's dad died not long after remarrying Bob's mom, So that is definitely a tumultuous childhood and to cope with these family upheavals. Bob took comfort in animals, later saying, I spent a great deal of time in the woods, and there weren't any other kids around, and I had to learn to play with the creatures that were in the woods. That's why I like animals and little squirrels and raccoons and all those things so much, because they're very special, very special. And when I got old, I guess I didn't lose that, and he didn't. In his adult life, Bob would care for animals and elaborate homemade environments, including an epileptic squirrel that lived in his empty jacuzzi. Right, squirrels. Squirrels were big for him. Friends would recall that Bob would just dropped to his knees and talk to squirrels whenever they went out for walks. This is I mean, it's all they were all they getting started, maybe, but it wouldn't all be adorable woodland creatures. In Bob's teen years, he dropped out of high school when he was in the ninth grade and took a job working as a carpenter with his father. And it was well doing this, and he accidentally cut off part of his index finger like Margot tennenbomb Oh my God, Yeah, and Jerry. Jerry Garcia famously was derailed from his career as a Blueger panjo player Yeah, from his wooden chopping accident, lost the tip of his ring finger, but thankfully for Bob Ross's future painting career, it was on his left hand, which he just used to hold his palette. But eagle eyed Joy of Painting fans have noticed this injury during close ups of the palette on the show. In keeping with the theme of his somewhat out of character early years, in eighteen year old Bob enlisted in the Armed Forces, beginning a twenty year career in the US Air Force, where he rose to the rank of Master sergeant. He worked as a medical records technician. But I guess this job required him to be kind of a tough guy, he would tell the Orlando Sentinel. I was the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work. The job required me to be a mean, tough person, and I was fed up with it. I promised myself that I ever got away from it. I wasn't going to be that way anymore, narrator voice. He did. If he subscribed in like multiverse theory, then somewhere in the world there's like a version of arle ermyst trading trading on his entire career as a as a camp sergeant, got into painting instead, and you could just see Arlie Army being like, we'll get these happy little trees in there, maggot. I love that. Seriously, Bob Ross was to kick your ass. Yeah, he this is subordinance used to call him, bust him up, Bobby behind his back due to his penchant for, in their words, ball busting. In a tremendous, truly canonical really article about Bob and The Daily Beast called Sex, Deceit and Scandal The Ugly War over Bob Ross's Ghost, author Alston Ramsey describes Bob in this period as quote a tall, lanky, all American, red blooded military man who drove fast cars, loved fast women, drank Scotch on the rocks, and smoked Salem Greens and Marlborough reds. He was laser focused, detail out oriented, and driven to excel. I'm a I'm a little turned off right now. How dare you weaponized my affection for tough mid century American men to your advantage? This is hitting below the belt, Jordans. I mean his early years are insane. He was deployed the Thailand at the end of the Vietnam War and then was stationed in Washington State and ultimately at the Elson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska. And it was here in Alaska that he first saw the snow in the mountains that would crop up again and again in his paintings. And being from Florida, this environment was completely foreign to him, and it proved immensely inspirational to his burgeoning interest in painting. So it would have been a little more than a hobby quickly balloon into a full blown obsession, kind of a side hustle. He was a single father, raising his son's Steve, a name familiar to fans of the show. He was a frequent guest and we'll talk more about Steve later, and supplementing his army pay was crucial to how raise his son. So he started drawing greeting cards and giving painting lessons to children and elderly town members, and they also painted Alaskan scenes onto gold pans that tourists bought as souvenirs you know of the gold Rush, for twenty five bucks a pop. Recently, one of these gold pans was listed on eBay with a buy it now price of sixty thousand dollars. So this work and his lessons made him something of a local celebrity. Earning Bob Ross is very first fans. The logical question at this point, you might ask, is how did Bob learn how to paint in the first place, coming from this rough and tumble, bare chested, double Floridians, bare knuckle brock baller kind of guy. I'm so glad you asked. There have been several versions. Bob didn't give many interviews, is the thing, and there are very few primary sources. When it came to his life, I sort of imagined him traveling around with like a switchblades strapped to his leg, telling people like, don't you talk about me anyway. One is that he started taking classes at a USO club but got frustrated by some of the teachers who are all about abstract paintings. Bob would later grumble, they'd tell you what makes a tree, but they wouldn't tell you how to paint a tree. But the most common retailing of the tale involves Bob's time moon lighting is a bartender at a local tavern to make some extra money. The TV in this bar was turned to PBS, which is hilarious. What bar have you ever been to with PBS on it? Boy? It gets better. Not only was it to the PBS, it was tuned to a painting show on PBS in a bar called The Magic of Oil Painting. It was hosted by a jovial German named Bill Alexander, who would create a landscape painting from scratch over the course of a half hour, leading viewers at home through the process with encouragement and uplifting homilies. As he spoke of happy trees and almighty brush is sound familiar. The Magic of Oil Painting is basically uh to use a similarly from an earlier episode of t M I The Hydros to Bob Ross's oreo, and the feud would become just as vicious. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Magic of Oil Painting was a hugely popular show when it aired on PBS between nineteen seventy two and two. The host, the aforementioned Bill Alexander made guest appearances on The Tonight Show, won a local Emmy, and even had show syndicated in Canada and Mexico, and he had his own line of paint supplies and books. Much of the show's popularity was down to the personality of Bill Alexander, who, despite his nickname as the Happy Painter, had a tough upbringing. Raised in Germany, he was drafted to fight in World War Two and captured by the Americans, who were so tickled with his painting talent that he was given preferential treatment and ultimately released. He painted his way to freedom AH, but his parents AH, and from freedom to the crushing lows of defeat. His parents had been killed by the Nazis, so he emigrated to the US and tried to make a living painting landscapes at an l a mall. Oh. This took a really dark turn, and in a classic Hollywood turn, he was discovered by producers at a local PBS station given his show, where he charmed audiences with his Happy Painter persona, delivering optimistic New a g adjacent slogans like open up your heart and let the sun in. His motto was you can't have the Light without the Dark, which a good tagline for his life. This sounds like the old like Germans who say nice things sketch with Steve Correll. Have you ever seen that? No, I have no idea what you're talking about. It was from the Dana Carvey Variety show that he had for like a couple of months, and they had Steve Correll and Colbert and all the Luis y k and it would just be like these German guys up there just screaming like it was a can't I used to be able to do a really good German voice and cannymore it was a pleasure babysitting Kevin. It's worth watching. There's a thread that always goes viral when it's ever like Tory musicians start talking about hitting Germany, about how Germans are like brutally direct with them about uh feedback to the point that sounds like aggressively rude, like it was an excellent show tonight. But I have seen Vilco twenty seven times, and if you want me to see you twenty seven times, you will have to be better. It just brutally direct people. Any any musician who's toured in Germany asked them for their stories of German feedback that they've gotten. Part of Bill Alexander's popularity was down to the lightning speed that he painted. This was due to his technique, which, to get a little freshman art history on you, was known as wet on wet to, a painting technique that dates back to the fifteenth century, when it was called a la prima, an Italian term meaning first attempt. This involved playing many layers of wet paint to a canvas rather than waiting for it to dry. This not only allows you to paint faster because you don't have to wait for these layers to dry, but it also allows you to blend the wet paint easily create the illusion of trees, clouds, mountains, bodies of water, et cetera. And this was a game changer to Bob Rass. He later said, it almost made me angry the first time I saw Bill Alexander on TV that he could do in a matter of minutes what took me days to do. Bob was so taken with this that he went right to the source and sought out Bill himself, and Bill happily taught him, which is something they would later come back to bite Bill Alexander in the ass. But at the same time, Bill was impressed with Bob Ross's talent and they hit it off, and Bill offered him a job at his company. See Bill was planning on retiring, possibly to Argentina. Steady, steady. He wanted to have an army of certified I wanted to have an army. Don't mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. We wanted to have, let's say, um a youth brigade of certified instructors who would travel across the country uh teach his patented Volks paintings techniques and by his brand and paint supplies. I this poor man was not a Nazi. Please forgive me. Bill was planning on retightning. He wanted to have an army of certified instructors travel across the country to teach his patented wet on wet painting techniques and buy his brand of paint supplies. And he wanted Bob to be one of his master apprentices. But by this point Bob was making more money from selling paintings and giving lessons than he was in the army. So in one at the age of forty. He retired from the Air Force after two decades and vowed never to raise his voice again and devote his life to painting that is that hurts in the best way. He basically became like a wondering martial arts monk. Yeah, yeah, he just traveled, traveled teaching his panning technique. He moved to back to his native Florida and became a traveling art instructor on the road for eight months a year in a motor home, setting up ad hoc classrooms in hotel function rooms, church halls, or small art shops across the country. But as with so many things, the Central Intelligence Agency inserts itself into our narrative. It was at one of these workshops during his travels in two that Bob Ross meant a middle aged couple who would change the trajective of his life. The Kowalski's a net and Walt Annette and Walt Kowowski. Great to meet you, Bob. They're related to the cigar chomping executive. They lived outside of Washington, d C. Where Walt worked for the CIA, and uh, if you got close to Walt, he'd sometimes vendori or with stories about his days eating monkey brains with the Viet Cong or strolling the Kremlin. But the Kowalskis were still a family in mourning. Their twenty four year old son had been killed in a car accident on the Beltway the year before, and Annette was, by her own description, merely catatonic with grief. She would later say, all I could do is lay on the couch and watch television. One of the few things that gave her joy during this time was watching The Magic of Oil Painting show on PBS, where Bill Alexander told her about the happy little trees in his happy little world where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Annette reached out to take lessons with Bill, but he said that he retired, and instead he recommended his apprentice, Bob Ross, who was giving a lesson in Clearwater, Florida. There's a multiverse somewhere where Bob Ross teams up with Jimmy Buffett, you know about right. Uh. Walt was so desperate to cheer up his wife that he drove her the thousand mile to Florida to take this class. It was a five day instructional course, and by the end a Net felt rejuvenated by Bob Ross his optimism, his serenity, his encouragement, his exuberance. How there were no mistakes in Bob's world, just happy accidents. Annett Kowalski later said, I saw and felt magic happening. I was so mesmerized by him. I didn't paint. I just followed him around the room all day, listening to the way he talks to people. And at the end of my five day class with him, I said, Bob, I don't know what you've got, but I think we should bottle it and sell it. She wanted everyone to experience the joy of paintings. So the Kowalski's approached Bob about splitting off from his mentor Bill Alexander and going into business for themselves. And this couple definitely knew a good thing when they saw it. Walter just retired from the c I A and was looking for something else to do, so they found that Bob raw incorporated, with the Kowalski's acting as the business minds. They mortgaged their house and sunk their life savings into the venture, and there were some rumors in later years, nasty rumors. I should say that what Kowalski used the CIA connections to get sweeter deals and contracts um unsubstantiated rumor lest if that's the most sordid thing the CIA is tagged with. I think we let him have. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So Barbara struck out alone, hitting the road in his motor home, spreading the joy of painting like a soft spoken, artistic Johnny apple Seed, or, to put in a less generous way, as he later said, we were like drug dealers. We come into town and get everybody absolutely addicted to painting. It doesn't take to get you. It did. He would say that a lot on his show, and he said it in interviews. Um. But money was tight and in the first year the business lost twenty grand, so Bob had to cut some corners. Thank god that was c I, a heroin trafficking could afford to take a hit. But Bob had to cut some corners, and one of them resulted in his signature look. According to the Bob Ross myth, he decided to save money on regular haircuts by getting his hair permed, and this was vaguely fashionable in the early eighties. Uh, and it meant that he didn't have to go every few weeks a get his regular military you know, high and tight. This look was certainly a choice. Apparently his old Air Force friends couldn't recognize him on the joy of painting, and we're only convinced that it was actually him when they saw the missing tip of his finger. Otherwise he was totally unrecognizable from the guy that knew in the armed forces. Uh. Sadly, this is this bumst me out. Bob apparently grew to hate the look, but by the time he was making enough to afford regular haircuts again, it had become his trademark, both literally and metaphorically. And that Kowski later said, when we got a line of paints and brushes, we put his picture on them. The logo is a picture of Bob with that hair, so we could never cut it. And he wasn't always happy about that. And later towards the end of his life, when he was being treated for lymphoma, he wore a curly wig to keep up appearances because it was so identified with him. It's like jack Nance keeping the eraserhead five years. Yes, and this brings us to a section that I like to call happy Little betrayals Bob Ross's mentor the Happy German painter Bill Alexander was originally pretty chill when Bob struck out on his own. He even filmed the commercial for Bob where he handed over his paint brush in the ceremonial passing of the torch moment, saying, I hand over the almighty brush. Who's almighty man, that's not that's not, I'll leave. But I could have done better on that. Uh. And having watched episodes of both the Magic of Oil Painting and the Joy of Painting, it's pretty obvious that Bob borrowed a lot of his phrases and uber positive mannerisms, you know, the happy little trees and all that. He billed himself as the Happy Alaskan, a play on Bill's nickname the Happy Painter, and Bob freely admitted that he copped Bill Alexander's painting technique, even dedicated an early episode of the Joy of Painting to Bill, explaining, quote, years ago, Bill taught me this fantastic wet on wet technique, and I feel as though he gave me a precious gift, and I'd like to share that gift with you. But then as Bob's popularity grew, his relationship with Bill Alexander, his old mentor became increasingly strange. You can kind of see this comment. It started when the Kowalskis and Bob Ross Incorporated released their own product line of paints, brushes, and palette knives that were essentially copies of Bill Alexander's products with just minor differences. And you know, Bill's products are a result of years of trial and error and seeing the stuff that worked best. He didn't take kindly to somebody, just you know, cribbing his style, and there were some hard feelings. I want to quote the Daily Beast piece on this because it's pretty harrowing. A close artist friend of Bill Alexander's recalled the exact moment when Bill found out that Bob struck out on his own. Bill, a man of seventy long years who had survived Hell on Earth onto the Nazis, remember and vowed to be thankful for every day thereafter, a man whose happiness buoyed all around him. That same Bill Alexander broke down and cried. It was horrible, it was heartbreaking, his friend explained to the Daily beast. It was like he lost a son. It broke his heart and he never spoke to Bob again. And when The New York Times profiled Bob Ross, they made the mistake of contacting Bill Alexander, under who said, under no uncertain terms, he betrayed me. I invented, I invented. I know I'm doing Doctor Strangelove. He betrayed me. I invented wet vet on vett. I trained him, and he sinks he can do it's better. Thank the offensive, that's good art. His storians have pointed out that the wet on wet technique have been used for centuries by everyone from Paul Sayson and John Singer Sergeant to Claude Monet, among many many others. But Bill Alexander's point was obvious. In the same Times piece, this is brutal, Bob refuses to name his longtime mentor, saying quote, now he is our major competitor, and that, my friends, is the cutthroat world of hobby painting in the eighties for you brutal wow under happier pastors failure, joy failure. Uh. They are conflicting stories about how Bob Ross first came to the attention of PBS. None are especially interesting, which is a rarity for this show in that we have deemed to skip something. Yeah, but we're doing that here. It's the first t M I one. We're skipping some minut show. The first series of The Joy Painting was taped at a public television studio in northern Virginia, near to where the Kowalski has lived, because they were CIA spooks. That is not a racial term, by the ways, this means CIA operatives who have no identities. Anyway, this only aired along the Eastern Seaboard and consequently had a small audience, which is perhaps for the best because Bob was still working out some of the kings. He was perfecting both the format of the show and also his persona. It was sort of a bust, and Bob abandoned it and went back to his traveling art tutorial gig. But when production switched to w I p B a PBS station in Muncy, Indiana. That's like a Simpsons punchline, why do I recognize Muncy, Indiana? Field and the Friends would use that an Abu Dhabi where the two Okay, that was where things started to gel. Bob initially approached them purely because he was doing a class and months and wanted to put an ad on the station, And as luck would have it, w I p B was one of the ten PBS stations in the country permitted to run paid ad spots at the time because they were in such dire straits financially. That's both an argument for kiss met and perhaps the grant the arc of the universe bends towards Bob Ross, but also a reminder to support your local PBS station focus. So Bob makes the ad, The turnout for the class is good, the station was impressed with him, and he decided to give the joy of painting another go on w I PB Monc, Indiana. They would produce the show until it ended just before Bob's death. That is thirty seasons of thirteen episodes a piece. So how's that work? Well, every three months, Bob would drive his motor home from his home in Florida to Indiana to film. Did you pull that up on Google Maps? What is that? Fifteen hours from Florida to Muncy. God love him. Ah. He would bang out an entire season of thirteen episodes in just two or three days. Thirteen episodes in two or three days. Since the episodes were largely unedited, he could tape one episode every twenty six minutes approximately. The W I p B studio is in the living room of a converted Victorian home, which is pretty hilarious given the shoe string of this ultra low budget shot with two cameras, a medium shot of Ross and his canvas, and a close up shot of the canvas or palette. The set was deliberately spartan, so it's not too distract from the painting. Bob wore his standard now canonical outfit of Jeane in a button down shirt every episode because he thought it was a timeless look and he didn't want anything that would date the episodes and hurt the chances of the show being run in syndication. I'm starting to gather that every single design choice that he made for the show made it look dated almost instantly, which I guess is part of the charm. It's timeless in that it never really was of its time. Yeah, exactly, it exists outside of time. Despite the freewheeling, laid back vibe of the show, Bob actually planned a lot of this quite meticulously. The painting he did every episode was not off the top of his head. He actually painted not one, but three versions of each painting you see in the show. And this will come back later into the by the Numbers segment that we do of this, So keep this fact in mind. Three versions of each painting. He did the first version beforehand, just to work out what he wanted to do. Then he painted the one you see on the camera, using the previous version as a reference while filming. Then after the show he painted a third, quote perfect version that was painted with a photographer who snapped every brush stroke for the instructional books that he published. Now, while there were some differences between these three versions, they were usually pretty minor. According to his business partner, Annett Kolowski, even his ad libs were well rehearsed. She later said, he told me he would lay in bed at night and plan every word. He knew exactly what he was doing. Talking to the Washington Business Journal in two thousand nine, she elaborated, every single thing Bob said or did on every program was deliberate. There was not one word that came out of his mouth that he hadn't thought about beforehand. He was a little ahead of his time, he sensed a growing evangelical mood in the country, so he started saying God bless my friend at the end of every show. He had a real sense for these things. That's horrifying. And that's not a quote, that's me interjecting. And of course we can't forget Bob's love for God's little things, his little critters that he loved to bring out on days when he had paintings that were less time consuming. There's Peepo the squirrel people would hang out in his pocket, but there was also people Jr. And Bob Et and most germane to my interest as an amateur corvidologist. He kept a crow. Do you know the name of the crow? Jim Crocey. I don't know Jim croce damn it beat me to it. That was not the actual name of the crow. That's just a little inside joke between me and Jordan's. You folks getting none of that. The joy of success, Thanks in part to these adorable creatures, but also the nuclear grade charm of Ross himself, the show was a massive success. Within a few short years, it was carried by nine of PBS network to the tune of four hundred and fifty stations across the country, bringing the joy of pain ainting into ninety three and a half million homes. Take a second, you insects to internalize that nine three and a half million homes. The show is also broadcast in Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Turkey, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Costa Rica, Canada, and Japan, where it aired twice a day on the network and HK twice a day. Bob Ross was on the air in Japan, Japan was second to the US in terms of audience numbers. When he visited Japan, Bob attracted Beatlemania level mobs. The station manager at w I p B tells the story of the Japanese television executives watching a version that had been dubbed in Japanese with Bob's voice wiped out. They flipped out and demanded that Bob's voice be added back in it. Even though audiences would have no idea what he was saying, the tones and timbre of his voice transcended the language. I love that, I love that It's true. I mean, I'm sure they had captions on our subtitles, but it dubbed. This gets to the larger question of why this show was such a global success. Bob's voice is clearly a major factor. Our critic, Mirror Shore compared his voice to Fred Rogers, noting similarities between Bob's soft voice and the slow pace of his speech. And there are also some who praised the virtues of his wet on wet technique, which is a fast and quick to learn method that allows beginners to paint trees, water, clouds, and mountains a matter of seconds with a huge two inch brush and painting knives. And Bob later said, I really believe that if you practice enough, you could paint the Mona Lisa with a two inch brush. It took Da Vinci four years to paint the Mona Lisa, but I guess with Bob Ross's wet on wet method, twenty six minutes should do it should get you there. Uh. The wet on wet technique didn't require a large investment in expensive tools, and Bob would brag that within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, his students would have a finished painting. And you know that's nothing to sneeze at. The New York Times piece from one that we've been quoting from with the awesome headline, The Frugal Gourmet of Painting says that quote as a cultural phenomenon, Mr Ross can be ranked with the overnight mail delivery service, liquid diet, weight loss programs, twenty four hour wedding chapels, television evangelicalism, and microwave ovens. He provides instant gratification to his followers, satisfaction guaranteed. But let me touched some necess earlier in the episode. Let's be real here. Have you ever actually watched The Joy of Painting to actually paint? Absolutely not? I know you've not. I've not, I don't know anyone who has. It was once estimated by the production team who makes a show that only between three and ten percent of viewers were actually painting along ten sounds high. I'd go with three. In Bob's own words, the majority of our audience doesn't paint, has no desire to paint, will never paint. They watch it strictly for entertainment value or for relaxation. We've gotten letters from people who say they sleep better when the show is on. It's interesting to me. I wonder how he felt about that. Oh man, I guess a noble soothing people to sleep is noble undertaking. Oh, I agree, and Bob Ross is likely the way that a certain segment of the population over the age of thirty, including me, discovered that they were susceptible to a s MR. What is a s MR? Join, Yes, let's talk about that phenomenon for just a moment. For anyone who doesn't know, it's the pleasurable, almost physical trancelike sensation of tingles on the scalp on the back of the neck in response to auditory stimuli like whispering, tapping, typing, usually mundane, ordinary everyday task. Isn't the thing like people do like yeah, yeah, with like the b by orioles that the world those microinoral yeah, microphones usually like it's like stereo panting. Like you you basically have two microphones that you're sort of tapping and panning the signals between. It can be something as similar as like, I mean, what I'm doing right now is dragging my fingers on the mic. But you can tap and people crinkle like wrappers and stuff and pan those signals to either side of a stereo channel and that and you wear headphones. People who want to experience that you listened to through headphones, and it gratifies people. Let's yeah, yeah, there's sometimes there's Yeah it's a little sexual. Let's let's get that out of the way. Yeah, thank you. Yeah I was. I wrote that and then I didn't say I want did it come back? I appreciate that, but yeah, the joy of painting hits the SMR trifecta due to both the natural tambrea Bob's voice plus this mellow cadence and the simple repetit to actions he does with his brushes. And the term SMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and that's a non clinical term that was coined in two thousand and ten by a woman named Jennifer Allen, who started the s MR Research Support Facebook group. And it's so named because very little is known about this phenomenon. The sensation literally didn't have a name before. I think many people felt like it was something that was unique just to them, and they're kind of seemed to be an element of shame surrounding it, at least until it was brought into the open in two thousand and seven when a woman with the user name okay whatever three eight described her experience of SMR sensations in an online health discussion forum steady health dot com. And that kind of was like open the floodgates for everyone saying, oh my god, I feel that way too. I thought that was just this weird thing of mine. It was this incredible period of everybody comparing notes and a huge section of population, but not every everybody notably realized they all felt the same way as a response to these triggers, and ever since, a cottage industry of YouTubers have racked up millions of page views with videos of them, I don't know, folding napkins, brushing hair, turning pages and magazines. There's something wonderfully poetic about like people deriving clause I sensual, let's sensual experiences from just the most mundange, you know. Yeah, Like, honestly, what more do you want out of life than to be able to be to get a borderline transcendent experience from somebody turning magazine pages? That's beautiful to me. Like that's like, that's like Buddhism, man to be like to be like fulfilled by like the very banalities of everyday life in like a way that lights up all your synapses, and I think that it's hypnotic. It is. I mean it's something I'm very susceptible to. And yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's something calming because it just is in the rhythm of living. I mean, I love watching people cook, for example, or with their hands. Yeah, I'm not into like the click clack stuff or any of the scratching or or crinkling. It's more watching people do things and there's just something beautiful about why with their hands, That's really what it is. Including card tricks and coin tricks and things. It's all about just like watching somebody's skillfully do something, which is I think why the Bob Rass Show is such a big one for me. But there are many questions about a SMR, arranging from why only certain people experience it and what percentage of the population they make up, and what are those who have never experienced it ever can if there's some trigger that would actually get them to experience it. Uh considering that most view it as at best the pseudoscience, there's been very little research done on a SMR. Stephen Novella who's a clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, suggested a potential scientific basis for the experience in a post on the Neurological blog. I want to quote some of it now. Perhaps a SMR is a type of seizure. Seizures can sometimes be pleasurable and can be triggered by these sorts of things, or a SMR could just be a way of activating the pleasure response. Vertebrate brains are fundamentally hardwired for pleasure and pain for positive and negative behavioral feedback. We're rewarded with a pleasurable sensation for doing things and experiencing things that increase or survival probability and have a negative or painful experience to make us avoid harmful behavior or warn us about the potential of danger or injury. Over evolutionary time, a complex set of reward and aversion feedbacks have developed. Add to this the notion of neurodiversity, the fact that all of our human brains are not clones or copycats, but vary in every way possible they can. We have a range of likes and dislikes, and there are individuals and even subcultures that seem to have a different pattern of pleasure stimulization than what's typical. Perhaps in some cases this is largely cultural, not neurotypical. S and m comes to mind. If reports are accurate, there are some people who experience pain as pleasure and erotic. That's all very interesting to me. The first peer reviewed research study into a SMR was published in by two psych researchers at Swansea University in Wales, and it was pretty base level, basically suggested that a SMR can improve mood and even pain symptoms through various common triggers including whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds, and slow movements. And other sciencests have looked directly at brain scans via FMR eyes and these suggest that there's a blending of neural networks, a sort of audio tactile synaesthesia, which most people associate synaesthesia with just being able to see colors of music, for example. The blending of different senses could also be something a little more simple. It could be an evolutionary thing because it reminds us of being children and our parents talking to us in these very soothing tones. So yeah, a lot of unknowns, but whatever, it is, Bob Ross has it. He has the SMR magic hashtag. Whatever it is, Bob has it. Getting back to Bob, given the wild success of his PBS show, guess how much money he made off of these four hundred and three episodes. Uh, prices right, rules, closes without going over? Well, I would always go over because he made zip zero not a bump kiss could put. Bob Ross was not paid to appear on his show. This is a common misconception, he told The Orlando Sentinel in people see you on television and think you make the same amount of money that Clint Eastwood does, which I don't know do they, Bob? But this is PBS. All these shows are done for free. This is the common structure of the shows. At the time, PBS Public Access Television served as advertising for whatever else this person had in their life, namely, in Bob's sake, his art lessons and the product line so he could bang out an entire thirteen episode season of The Joy of Painting in just over two days, which freed him to get back to his private lessons, which is where he made money, and his company at this point also produces how two books over a hundred branded tapes and art materials, and at one point several hundred certified Bob Ross method instructors fanned out across the globe, all of which, presumably he got a decent percentage of um. Bob Ross Incorporated ultimately blossomed into a multimillion dollar venture. And uh, you know, when Bob wasn't busy doing the lord's work, tending to injured creditters in his empty jacuzzi, he was cruising the streets of Florida in his nineteen sixty nine Silver corvette with its Nity Bob Ross license plate, or who had this on their bingo card, collecting Victorian era opalescent glass, Victorian era opalescent glass, ripping butts in his sixty nine corvette with his Bob Ross vanity plate in search of Bob Ross is railing lines of coke in Miami, like I don't care what you gotta do. You get me that Victorian glass, but get me that follow of Prussian blue. Get me it. I'm gonna come back here in one week and I want you to get me that glass. Somehow that turned into the Ray Winston rat Get made a glass. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. But of course, even something as pure and beautiful as Bob Ross has its haters. For the piece on Ross, The New York Times interviewed employees at Pearl Paint Company, store of modern Renown in downtown New York City, where people like Bosciott used to shop. These employees are described as struggling painters, so it's really no surprise that they resent Bob's success. They say that they keep Bob's branded products in a quote happy little corner in the back so as not to offend uh. They allow that Bob has attracted people who wouldn't ordinarily be involved in art. But his partner at Pearl Paints, this gentleman who's interviewed his partner pro paints is not as generous. Quote, it's cabinet making. He's sniffed. It is formulaic and thoughtless. Art as therapy, which go for yourself. Art therapy is a thing was like. So they described the Bob Ross style as pizzeria arts. Paintings often hung in pizza part These guys, ah, how dare you slander not only pizza parlors but Bob Ross. Oh a world renowned painter was also approached for this New York Times piece Richard poo sat Dart, who said an abstract expressionist, yea father post Dart of the Post Dark Band. It was a New England favorite. I feel like my parents used to see see them a lot. It sounds terrible. Quoted by The Times, is saying, I am horrified by art instruction on television. It's terrible, bad, bad, bad. They are just commercial exploiters, non artists teaching other non artists. I don't teach a technique or a method. I nurture students to find their own. Thank god you didn't make me read this beforehand. I would have vomited my own mouth. But Bob had his own words for abstract inspressionists. If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is. Abstract expressionism was funded by the CIA as a direct result of the Soviet art concentration on realism, on paintings of like peasants striving in the fields and these large scale renderings of industrial art. Did you know that? Where is this? What are you getting this? I've never heard this do a quick sidebar. I wasn't prepared to do this. Wow, that is fascinating. I had not heard that. Get this on stuff that I want you to know. This is on BBC. This is alright, so quick bullet points abstract expressionism. We're talking William Dacooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko. I'm quoting the BBC here. One of the most remarkable things about the movement was the speed with which it rose to international prominence. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to reach their signature styles, once the movement had crystallized by the late forties, it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. By the fifties, it was generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture were taking place in New York rather than Paris. A year after Jackson Pollock's death in a car crash, the met paid thirty grand for his one of his paintings, an unprecedented amount. Now we know for a fact that the CIA bankrolled certain cultural initiatives as part of its war against the Soviet Union. It did so indirectly through part of programs such as this organization, Congress for Cultural Freedom, which is an anti communist advocacy group active in thirty five countries, which the CIA helped establish and fund. For example, it paid for the Austin Symphony Orchestra to travel to Paris to participate in a festival of Modern music. Now, according to a historian named Francis Stanor Sanders, the CCF financed several high profile exhibitions of abstract expressionism during the nineteen fifties which toward Europe. Between nine. An exhibition brought to London was funded by an American milliader named Julius Fleshman. Fleshman was the president of a body called the Farfield Foundation, which was funded by the CIA. So you connect all these links, you can essentially infer that much of the spread, if not the school. Like we're not saying the CIA gave Jackson Paula could check. What we're saying is that the dissemination of the school of abstract expressionism that was popular in mid century America was pushed by cultural funds that the CIA had a hand in. I don't where I was going with that. My point is, I mean, so your point was, Bob Ross, the military man has a reason for hating abstract expressionists. Yeah, but he's also one degree of separation away from the dam c I A. But what we're talking about mystery and the c I A and and shadowy figures. Let's get to the shadowy figure Bob Ross himself, because, as you said the top of the episode, not a lot is known about this man. Yeah, for someone who has had such an impact, it was such a public figure for the duration of their life, there is surprisingly little out there about the life of Bob Ross. There's an article on the site Today I found Out called the Surprisingly Mysterious Life of Bob Ross that delves into this phenomenon. Bob valued his privacy. Some of only a few interviews with his close knit circle of friends and family can be found in the two thousand eleven PBS documentary Bob Ross The Happy Painter, which is really the closest thing that exists to an official biography. Yeah, it's it's really weird. I watched it the other day. It as cameos from Jane Seymour, Brad Paisley, Philled donnihue, the TV show Paisley, Yeah, yeah, Phill donni here, the chat show host and TV network chef Duff Goldman, which is weird. Duff Goldman. Anyway, other conversations with Bob were destroyed as part of a legal sentiment between Ross's family and Bob Ross, Inc. Which we'll get into the distinction between Bob Ross's family and Bob Ross Inc. Later. Even the biographical book Happy Clouds, Happy Trees the Bob Ross phenomenon admitted that their text quote is about an understanding we have Bob in his life. If we had wanted to write an accurate biographical book on Bob Ross, that goal would have been difficult to accomplish. Bob said he never turned down requests for interviews quote, I'm just rarely asked. However, in another interview he gave with Egg Magazine, Bob admitted that he liked to stay hidden, adding that he was quote sort of hard to find. Again. He's a spook, He's a ghost. He's one of these CIA guys that doesn't have any fingerprints. It's possible that he was concerned that elements of his personal life, specifically his time in the Air Force UH, would have been come to light and been bad for his image. Yeah, didn't jibe with the brand to quote the Daily Beast piece. From his earliest days, Ross had issues with fidelity. Like his father before him, he had fathered a child as an unmarried teen, and his first marriage had fallen apart over affairs. He was also said to have squeezes in various places over the years, as did many traveling TV artists of the time, and that for a second, as had many traveling TV artists of the time. Yeah, that's a short list that would get us. But so you get back to me about that one, folks, Well, sorry, we've meandered enough. You are not here because you want to hear about the sordid details of Bob Ross's personal life. You are here because you love the man and want to get closer to him and his work. In fact, you might even want to buy a Bob Ross painting of your very own. This seems like an easy thing, right after all, Between the ones he painted on the show plus his years as a traveling art instructor, Bob estimated that he must have painted upwards of thirty thousand canvases. If that's true, or even remotely in the ballpark, that would make him the most prolific painter in history. A core andy information tally by the website The Hustle Picasso sits at second place for the most prolific artists, having completed an estimated thousand, five hundred paintings, and on a at third place with two thousand, five hundred. I'm surprised Warhol isn't on that list. Does that count reprosprint um silk screening stuff? I don't know. His website says that he produced over nine thousand paintings and sculptures and nearly twelve thousand drawings, so I'm not sure, but yeah, maybe it's they have strict definitions, but how the paintings are made. But anyway, clearly there are many Bob Ross paintings out there in the world, so clearly they must come up for sale all the time. Right, dead wrong, very wrong. Bob Ross paintings are famously impossible to obtain. The major auction houses like Julian's and Christie's have reportedly never come across a Bob Ross painting. Why is this? Well? In short, to borrow phrase from Billy Preston, that's the way Bob planned it, That's the way Bob wanted it to be. His relationship to his work was always interesting because he didn't crave any sort of professional validation whatsoever. As he told The New York Times, quote, there are thousands of very, very talented artists who will never be known even after they're dead. Most painters want recognition, especially by their peers. I achieved that a long time ago with TV. I don't need anymore. And that's just a really interesting outlook. He only had one retrospective held at the minestrac Cultural Center in Muncy, where he taped the show. Other than that, Bob said he had no interest in a major exhibit, and he was also opposed to flipping his paintings for profits. He frequently said on his show that he donated his paintings to PBS stations to auction off at fundraisers to quote make a happy buck. And for years w I p B TV, the PBS station to Munsey where Bob filmed most of his episodes, with auction off of Bob Ross painting at its annual fundraising drive, and according to the town's local paper, these paintings were always the most anticipated item at the auction, overshadowing things like tickets to Cancoon, diamond necklaces, rare beanie babies, and basketball signed by Magic Johnson. Damn right, Yeah, The rare paintings of Bob's that do come to market are almost exclusively from before his TV career, when he sold paintings just to survive of in Alaska. These works frequently sell for tens of thousands of dollars. There's a story of a flight instructor from Alaska who bought a landscape scene from a local artist in the early eighties at an art fair for something like sixty bucks. It spent years sitting in his garage until his son, who was a big fan of Bob Ross's YouTube videos, thought that he recognized the signature in the corner of the painting, and sure enough it was an authentic Bob Ross painting. Sold for ten grands. So check your Alaskan landscape paintings, folks, because you never know. Uh. Bob said he painted thirty thousand pre owned Mountain Stream original. It's going for a hundred and fifty five thousand eBay right now. Wow? Wow Ross original wet unwet gold pan. Uh what he did nineteen seventy with certificate of authenticity twelve thousand. That sounds like a deal. Another pan ten, another one nine thousand. Wow, that's kind of all you get. I mean, there's not a lot out there, and why is that? I mean, the main question is, where the hell are these paintings that Bob painted on the Joy of Painting? Well, no less an authority than The New York Times launched an investigative report in twenty nineteen called Where all the Bob Ross Paintings? Well we found them. This is an incredible video. Uh. It turns out these paintings are held at Bob Ross Incorporated headquarters in an anonymous looking office building in suburban Virginia. There's a trove of more than a thousand paintings worth well over a million dollars sitting in cardboard boxes. I think there's a couple that are on the walls in the office, but mostly they're just canvases, just shoved in these cardboard boxes where they sit gathering dust. Bob's old business partners, the Kowalski's, who oversee Bob Ross Incorporator, holding fast to Bob's wish that these never get sold, and the companies now in the control of the Kowalski's daughter Joan, who told Hustle dot Com quote, the paintings have always just sort of been here. We were sort of behind the times. It never occurred to us that anyone would want them. The company, which you can call right now at one hundred Bob Ross Uh gets constant inquiries from folks about buying these paintings, but they are not for sale. John Kowalski says, our only mission is to preserve the mythological wonderment that was Bob Ross. However, her mother and Net Kowalski, the woman who discovered Bob in the eighties and was as closest business partner, is the only authenticator in the world of Bob Ross's paintings. She said that in addition to the brushwork and other signs of Bob's hand, she looks for a specific detail and the quality of a signature that, for understandable reasons, she has declined to describe because she doesn't want to aid any foragers out there. But if a painting is certified to be a Bob Russ original, the owner will be provided with documentation attesting with authenticity. Despite the controversy surrounding the Kowalskis and the way they spun this man's image into a multimillion dollar industry in recent years while simultaneously cutting out Bob's own son, which we'll talk about later. I do think it's admirable that they honored Bob's wish and didn't bust up the collection in the wake of mounting pressure from fans, and it is a hell of a collection. They have an estimated one thousand, one hundred sixty five paintings stored on site, according to an analysis by the website five thirty eight, which we'll hear more from them later. Ross painted three hundred eighty one of the four hundred and three episodes of the show. The rest featured a guest if there are three version for each of these paintings that he did you know one before the show, won during the show, won the painting after the show. For the how two books there are at least one thousand, one d forty three originals from The Joy of Painting Show. However, storing these canvases and cardboard boxes in rooms that aren't climate controlled is not the best way to store these treasures. Simply put what they belong in a museum here it is, and recently Bob Ross Incorporated were contacted by the granddaddy of all museums, the Smithsonian. Over the years, the Smithsonian Museum of American History was inundated with letters and emails from Bob Ross fans, and in ten they contacted Bob Ross Incorporated about obtaining some of his work. Four paintings were chosen by the museum's curators for their permanent collection. Sadly, three of these paintings are all the same. They have three versions of the painting on a Clear Day from season fourteen, the preliminary version, the version he painted on the show, and the one he did towards, as well as the book version of Blue Ridge Falls from season thirty. That's They also obtained a converted step ladder that he used as an easel during his first season on the show, two handwritten notebooks that we used to plan the productions of season two and three, and also some brushes and palette knives. And when the museum reopened after COVID in May of one On a Clear Day was on display. And this is amazing poetic justice because Bob would often tell his detractors, Hey, I know my work's never gonna hang up the Swithsonian, and now it does. Believe in yourself so well, you can't buy a Bob Ross painting you can at least see them. In addition to the four in the Smithsonian collection, there are whopping fifty four Bob Ross's paintings on display at the Bob Ross Artworkshop in New Smyrna Beach. I'm not even gonna try to guess that. Google it in Bob's native Florida, and this has been described as a must visit for Bob Ross die hards, where you can take a class in Bob's method of painting. But for my money, this is the thing that really gets me excited. There are twenty seven of Bob's paintings held in the I'm gonna take a guess that's how you say this Mini tries the museum in Muncie, Indiana, where Bob taped all but one season of the show. And I don't want to check this out myself, because they just opened a one point two million dollar interactive exhibit called the Bob Ross Experience, the less successful follow up to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They opened up this exhibit in the very studio where Bob taped his show at w I P. B. Yes, you could visit the very room where he taped nearly all of the Joy of painting, and the room has been restored to how it was in Bob's time, complete with personal effects like his paintbrushes, his easel, his palette, as well as the vix Vapo rub he used to clear as sinuses, his hair, pick his shirts, his keys. It's all there, and there are reportedly at present time, six of his paintings on display, but like I said, I think they have twenty seven of them in their collection, and they offer classes in his painting method too, So you can paint in the very building where The Joy of Painting was filmed. I just I love this. Let me read from the website because it seems both awesome and hilarious. Explore the life, philosophy, and art of the iconic American painter inside the historic home where The Joy of Painting was filmed. The immersive exhibit features original paintings and artifacts, inspiring visitors with Bob's message of fearless creativity. You can step into the restored television studio and stand where Bob stood at the iconic easel where he beat the devil out of his brushes. Across the hall, you will be transported to a nine eighties living room, the setting where much of the world discovered and enjoyed Bob. I love this so much. And if you can't make the trip to any of these places, you could view Bob's work digitally on the Internet. There's a website called two inch brush dot com, named for his favorite painting instrument, and they have an unofficial database that organizes all four hundred and three paintings from the Joy of Painting by season and episode. And now, folks, we have to get what you really come to too much information for not the impressions, not the bits, not the references to Nazis fleeing to Argentina, but the cold hearted data. This database has allowed us to study Bob's work like never before and figure out the inner workings of the misunderstood genius, to bring us closer to Bob. To bring us closer to Bob, Nate Silver's data crunching website analyzed every episode in which Bob painted live, and their discoveries were well Jordan wrote, shocking, but it's it's not really shocking. Move will move past that. They concluded of raw his paintings contained at least one happy little tree, contained happy little clouds, had almighty mountains, and thirty four contained peaceful mountain lakes, but a man after my own heart? Do you know what? He almost never painted people in miserable humanity quote, I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this with these people. On rare occasions, Bob would incorporate a cabin. But and that Kowaski had an interesting point about those. I will tell you Bob's biggest secret, she said, perhaps over this quote. If you notice his cabin has never had any chimneys on them. That's because chimneys represented people, and he didn't want any sign of a person in his paintings. There's an early viral video of some guy addressed as Bob singing a song called That's why I don't paint people, which I love. In the eleven years that Ross painted on television, there are only a few known instances in which he included a human figure in his landscapes. There's Morning Walk from season seventeen, episode eleven, two people stroll through the woods, camp Fire from season three, episode ten, a figure in a hat leans against a tree, and according to an at Kowalski, camp Fire was among Ross's least favorite paintings. But despite his apparent disdaining for humanity, Bob was very good at connecting with them, especially for his high profile media appearances. He was a regular guest on The Phil Dona Hue Show. Once he brought five members of the audience on stage to do a painting tutorial live on air. In nine, he appeared on the Joan Rivers show I'd like to see that I know uh, and also appeared on Regis and Kathie Lee. In the early nineties, Rosie even did several MTV promotional spots. He painted a snowy mountain and said MTV, it's all just fluffy white clouds, which is a great bit of shade that's on YouTube. It's good. It's good. He made Jordan's maybe Jordan's favorite cameo and Bill Nye The Science Guy, where he did a self parodic segment entitled The Artistic I with Bob Ross and apparently a major country music fan, Bob appeared at the Grand Old Opry, even being called on stage to take a bow by a friend and fan, Hank Snow In seven and why Not Hard to find an enemy for Bob Ross. Everyone loved Bob. Bob made his final appearance in the same year. He died not on the Joy of Painting, but on the pilot episode of another PBS show, a children's series called The Adventures of Elmer and Friends. And this is so touching because it had been Bob's long term goal to host a kid's show. Series premiered in six just a year after his death, and that episode included a final message of thanks from Ross to his fans and viewers, along with the musical tribute. Bob's health had always been shaky. He was a cigarette smoker from most of his adult life, and he was apparently convinced for very many years that he would die young. In the mid eighties, he suffered a heart attack while in Indiana to film a season of The Joy of Painting. He was diagnosed with limphoma in early but he kept the diagnosis largely secret outside his immediate circle. He died the following year on the fourth of July in Orlando, Florida. And you're hard to find a more American death than dying on the fourth of July in Orlando. I say that without sarcasm. His remains are interred at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Gotha, Florida, under a plaque marked Bob Ross television artist, which I think doesn't a grave disservice. Strangely, none of his business partners, the Kooski's, attended the funeral, although they did send flowers. And this is where things get a little less happy. Yes, in the late tens, the documentary and Joshua Rofi wanted to make a film without the life of Bob Ross. He previously worked on a true crime series called Sasquatch and on two thousand nineteens Lorena about Lorena Bobbitt. So he was expecting that this was gonna be a nice palate cleanser in his CV, a sweet excursion into the world of happy trees and fluffy clouds. He thought wrong. He soon learned that very few people wanted to go on records speaking to him for fear of legal retributions. Dozens of people declined to go on camera to speak about a PBS painter, all expressed concerns over lawsuits. Obviously, he knew he hit a nerve here. This ultimately led to the creation of the documentary Bob Ross, Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed, which hit Netflix last year. In this film, he uncovered a massive schism between Bob's sons Steve, and Bob's business partners, the Kowalski's, who control Bob Ross Incorporated. The story it's a little convoluted, but it goes a little something like this. Bob Ross Incorporated was initially a four way partnership between the husband and wife a Neette and Want Kowalski, and Bob Ross and his wife. Bob's wife died in the early nineties, which gave the Kowalskis a controlling interest in the company. In other words, due to a quirk of b and its legalities, Bob was a minority shareholder in the company that controlled his own image. There have been allegations that when Bob was diagnosed with lymphoma, the Kowalski's tried to pressure him in the signing over the rights to his estate before he died, and there are stories of screaming matches on the phone. Well the man was literally dying with Bob going back to his Air Force days, screaming I am not giving you my name. Shortly before his death, Bob made a series of changes to his will, specifying that his name, likeness, and the rest of his intellectual property go to his two sons, supposedly at a spite against the Kowalskis because he was so annoyed that they were putting him through all this business stress when he was so sick. But after Bob's death, the Kowalski's countered this in court because when Bob died, they became the sole owners of Bob Ross Incorporated. And they claimed that virtually everything that Bob had ever done in his life was a work for hire, and thus Bob Ross had no right to bequeath his state, is, image and all that stuff to his sons. The Kowalski has won this lawsuit and there was an undisclosed settlement with Bob's son Steve, leaving him unable to financially benefit from his father's name or image. So legally the Kowalskis have one. But this documentary is basically about the moral ambiguities of the situation, which some of Bob's friends have dubbed Grand Theft Bob. This documentary it's very good, it's pretty nuts. It's told mostly from the perspective of Bob's son, Steve, because the Kowalski has refused to be interviewed. They claim that it's because the filmmakers weren't being transparent. Uh. Steve, Bob's son, says the Kowalski's called them two days after his dad died and said, according to him, I want you to listen to me carefully. Any Bob Ross art products, anything related to art or painting, you could never make those, distribute those, create a business around those. Nothing. But if you would like to do anything not painting or art related, that's fine. You can do Bob Ross pickles, Bob Ross, shoes, Bob Ross whatever, but you cannot put the Bob Ross name on a painting or an art related product ever, period, for the rest of your life. And so for years Steve Ross, Bob Ross's son, didn't paint, which was heartbreaking for him because he was damn good at it. Family friends said that he was better than his father. And it's doubly sad because when Bob was alive, he badly wanted to get Steve into the family business. But you know, as most young men are, he wanted to go his own way and wanted to do his own thing. And Bob would have his son Steve as a guest on the joy of painting, and you watched these episodes and Steve looks kind of embarrassed to be there. He's in his late teens or early twenties, and Steve told Vanity Fair last year, as kids, we all wanted defy our parents and hang out with our friends. But as we get older, we begin to understand that our parents are pushing us to be greater than themselves because they seek the best for us. Like all young kids who know a little about this world, I thought I knew everything as a teenager, but had limited reference concerting what this world had to offer. So by the time Steve came around and was ready to live up to his destiny as the son of Bob Ross and Paint, it was too late. His dad had died and the Kowalski's apparently warned him to stay away from art. So as a result, this poor guy, Steve fell into a deep depression for years, and he tells the story of driving on the highway one night, just trying desperately to fight off the urge to swerve in the oncoming traffic. And in this documentary, Steve claims that his father, Bob, had an affair with his business partner in that Kowalski despite the fact that they were both married, an affair that she strenuously denies. But Bob did name his pet squirrel bob At, a blend of both their names, which in some cultures means they're married. Um. For years, the Kowalski's only used Bob's name to market art supplies and books, but when their daughter took over the company in the twenty tens, she started to explore other ways of merchandizing, moving into the realm of toys, games, chea pads, breakfast cereals, all that. And that's when Bob's sons Steve sued because remember they told him, like, you know, you can do all Bob Ross pickles and all that stuff if you want, but now they're moving on to his turf. The settlement allowed Steve to resume a career in art at long last, But according to the end credits of this documentary quote, despite Bob's intentions, Steve has not received any of the profits from Bob Ross Incorporated to date. UM. We should add, for legal reasons that Bob Ross Incorporated denies these allegations. In a statement issued after the documentary was released on Netflix, it said Bob Ross Incorporated. Takes strong issue with the inaccurate and heavily slanted portrayal of our company in the Netflix film. If not for the efforts of the remaining founders and their dedication to his mission, Bob's artistic and cultural relevance and his express desire to become the world's most beloved painting teacher and friends would have been lost decades ago with his passing. In the end, it really does seem like the old battle between art and commerce. But the good news is that Steve bob Rass's son is painting again, and that's nice. He returned to his passion. And in the documentary, Bob comes out with his reputation as a secular saint generally intact, so that's good too. He's everything you want him to be. Just it's it's a reminder to make art because you want to. Yeah, and you should just do it because you love it, and you do it for the reason that touches you. And if other people respond to it, that's the cherry on top. What are your thoughts on Bob Brass. I'm I'm curious. Well, after going through this whole episode, I feel for the guy. You know. I mean, he had a he had a tough road to home and he found something that he loved. He inhabited it, he lived it. He arguably gave a lot more people an experience of it enjoy than his predecessor. And to see people who produce nothing, yeah and just did all the paperwork fighting vociferously over his life's work is sickening. Like I said, it's a good reminder to make the things you make for you and because you like them, and not because you think they're gonna get you rich. You want to teach people how to do them, that's even better. But even something as pure as Bob Ross will eventually get dragged through the muck of courts and finances. So I'm begging you do it because you love it. Don't do it to become an influencer or any that. Just do it because you want to make happy little mountains. Because something terrible, but Bob, more than twenty five years after his death, in people, people love I love Bob Ross, you love Barbros. We all love Bob Ross. His legend continues to grow with each passing year. His videos are viewed by millions on streaming platforms, target recently released a board game called Bob Ross The Art of Chill. Nintendo were preparing a Joy of Painting video game for we that ultimately fell through at the last minute, but thankfully, a limited edition Magic the Gathering Card debt came the fruition in Fans make and sell Bob Ross lego figures on Etsy. HDTV made a Halloween costume. There's even a Bob Ross slow cooker, and in Chicago there's an annual Bob Ross bar crawl where upwards of fifty people dress up in frizzy wigs and Oxford button downs and terrorized local pubs. What convinces people to do this? Why? Is the cult of Bob stronger than ever? His former station manager Jim Needum speculates that, in addition to the chill vibes and uncon sational support, Bob's brilliance was that he quote gave people a chance to have control over a small part of their world, and they could make it however they liked. When asked about is relaxed and calm approach, Bob said, I got a letter from somebody a while back, and they said, Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy, that's for sure. That's why I paint. It's because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, just watch the news, so I'd say, in a funny way, Bob Ross and his work. It's a potent reminder that the world could be whatever you wanted it to be. Yeah, it's you can um. Candid m Voltaire says, we should just tend to our gardens, you know, just focus on the joy you give people and what you can create in your own little happy world. You can substitute anything for painting and the joy of paint, the joy of jogging, the joy of whatever. What your Yeah, don McLean. No air conditioner repair. There's an art and air condition or repair. Anyway. This has been too much information in a very heartfelt deep dive into Bob Ross. Thank you folks for listening. I'm Alex Tagel and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heeart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaumb and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight five