Tuesday, May 27, 2008

TPC Exposé : Bob Ross

This will be the first in new segment on The Primate Cage of hard hitting Exposé. An ongoing series meant to tackle the hard questions no one is asking.
My wife and I were having a typical deeply intellectual and thought provoking conversation about matters of great importance a few days ago and the question came up..."Where are all the paintings that Bob Ross painted during his show?"
The television program "The Joy of Painting" ran from 1983 to 1995 and was a staple of Public Television. On the show the Afroed Bob Ross painted an entire landscape painting in the half hour segments. During the twelve years the show was on the air I estimate that Bob painted roughly 45 million paintings. One can only assume it's taken Bob several years to attain the "Happy Tree" level of painting mastery that he had accomplished. We will estimate that in the off time from the show both in lifetime achievement and hobby painting Bob produced another 700 million paintings. This would make a combined total of about 745 million paintings.
We at TPC ask, "Where the fudge are those paintings?" We set out to find the answer. We speculated that there is somewhere a Bob Ross museum where there are miles and miles of corridors setup to display this staggeringly large collection. My wife assumed the were given away during the PBS beg-a-thons, probably with a nice tote bag with the PBS logo and a DVD of the best of Nova. The real answer? This simple line from Wikipedia sums it up.
"After his death, Bob Ross Incorporated donated most of his paintings to charities and public television stations."
A simple answer. But I don't think this ends here. What charities were these masterpieces going to? What did PBS do with the paintings? These questions we may never know the answers to. I assume some major art hoarder is hanging onto these gems in some private collection. Maybe they are hanging next to the "real" Mona Lisa and other stolen works of art. Never to be adored by mankind ever again. The human population will never be quite whole until these priceless works of art are put on a public display in a fine museum, or for sale in front of a large truck parked on a corner somewhere with oversize towels with pictures of Elvis or Tigers on them.
At least we can purchase one episode of The Joy of Painting on VHS for only $39.99 and relive the magic.

3 Comments:

Blogger Phat Tony said...

Have you ever seen the end of The Raiders of the Lost Ark when they show the gigantic government warehouse filled with unmarked crates? I think the govt. is hiding the paintings alongside a secretly recovered Ark. Also, I sold Bob Ross a pizza when I worked for Little Caesar's.

12:27 PM  
Blogger Phat Tony said...

Also, I've heard that when you line all of Bob Ross' paintings up in chronological order, it summons the alien overlords to return to earth.

12:34 PM  
Blogger Laura C. said...

So Tony, are you saying that Bob Ross is in fact an alien himself? That would make a lot of sense in my book. There's no way a real human being could have that nice and happy little voice all the time. And then there's the hair. Alien for sure.

8:22 PM  

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