Happy 70th Birthday, Bob Ross: Creator of Happy Trees

[cooleddie74]

Today would have been the seventieth birthday of legendary public television painter Bob Ross of The Joy of Painting. Bob was born in Florida on Oct. 29, 1942 and died from complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1995 before his fifty-third birthday.

Happy birthday and Godspeed, Bob. We love you and miss you. Thanks for adding wonder and beauty to the lives of countless millions with your talent and gentle spirit.

[Naira]

I had no idea if he was dead or alive... When I was a high school student, a local channel showed his "The Joy of Painting" show every day at the time I was back from school and I remember watching it. It was also dubbed in Greek, which is not very usual around here. I liked it.

[CorporalCaptain]

Bob gets a well-deserved Google doodle today!

I loved his show; it always grabbed me until the end when I was channel surfing back in the day.

[J.T.B.]

That guy became a big joke in my high school, we had him as a character in a couple of assembly programs. It's almost hard to relate now how out-of-place he seemed in the late '80s; he was like a real-life version of the old '60s/'70s photos of their parents that kids made fun of. But it was pretty obvious that he couldn't care less, that was who he was. I always got a kick out of watching his show on PBS, he seemed like a genuine, decent guy and I was sorry to hear the news when he died at an early age.

Justin

[Ar-Pharazon]

The things that man could do with trowels & putty knives was mind blowing.

[Darth Duck]

[cooleddie74]

You were enjoyed.

[TheSeeker]

I always loved watching him paint. It was just amazing how quickly and effortlessly he could create a painting.

[cooleddie74]

The 2011 PBS documentary on Bob titled "The Happy Painter" was one of the best things I've ever seen about the man and showed what an impact he had on pop culture and the amateur art world with his show and his love and devotion to the art he cherished teaching so much. I don't think you can stream it anywhere and its not available on YouTube because of Bob Ross Inc.'s (all too) strict control over what gets posted on the site but if you can manage to watch the program I think you guys would deeply enjoy it.

[Admiral_Young]

I am glad this was mentioned (thanks cooleddie!). I've been a Bob Ross fan since I was a little kid. I want to see that documentary. There are some full "The Joy of Painting" episodes available on Vimeo but yeah almost nothing on youtube or really elsewhere. I had thought it was a control issue.

[cooleddie74]

There were a nice handful of complete, unedited episodes on YouTube until fairly recently, then the Bob Ross Inc. people stepped in and forced the site to pull the videos. Now the longest YouTube clips of Bob painting are just a few minutes long or are slightly longer, edited tributes to him that mishmash a lot of different clips together.

Vimeo does have some available to watch but nowhere near as many as I'd like and I've noticed a lot of those seem to be from the same season/series of the show(#15). I wish Bob Ross Inc. weren't so stringent about and intolerant of episodes of the old show being posted online...I think if Bob himself were still alive he might not even care.