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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> Bob Ross as we know him only blew up in the 2010s in the internet/YouTube/streaming age.

No, he was just as well-known when his show was on the air. He was a household name, his paintings and style was known, and people talked about him enough to have opinions on whether he was an "artist" or just a TV show host.

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I was going to call this anecdotal evidence based on it never appearing in the top 100 (or so) Nielson rated TV shows for a year, based on the lists for 1984-1995 here[0].

However, it looks like PBS never signed up for Nielson until 2009, so we have limited/no public data on viewership of The Joy of Painting (or Sesame Street, etc for that matter).

http://www.thetvratingsguide.com/2020/02/tvrg-ratings-histor...

There's a lot of TV shows out there, even in the 80s and 90s, and plenty of ways for celebrities to have their image and reputation bolstered. Ratings aren't reliable in trying to measure someone's notoriety.

Growing up in the late 80s/90s, and mostly outside of the US, I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Bob Ross was.

Inside the US, never heard of him until later 2000s or so as well. And watched PBS at times.

Did you grow up wealthy in the 80s? Most people didn’t have cable television back then, it was comparatively expensive and not available outside major metropolitan areas. Most people only had a half dozen TV channels or so, and sometimes Bob Ross was the only thing on TV worth watching. Everyone knew who he was.

We were not rich but had basic cable since 1979 or so. Maybe California was ahead on that front. My memory is that it only cost perhaps $10 a month in the 80s.

My experience was that accidentally tuning into Joy of Painting for about 45 seconds was enough to completely hook me (although I was not fully aware of this at the time).

There was a lot less tv in the 80s. If you didn’t have cable, then you just had a handful of channels. I didn’t watch Joy of Painting, but it was pretty hard not to notice the painting Afro guy when flipping through the extremely limited number of channels most people had access to.

My sense is that he was known to frequent PBS viewers (I remember him from before 2010) — but the whole Chia-fro thing and "happy clouds" or whatever meme-like thing that comes to mind definitely took him to the mainstream crowd with the internet.

Agree. Few people watch PBS. The readership here is not representative.

I think a lot of people who were or had kids pre-internet streaming probably watched PBS, at least sometimes.

Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Reading Rainbow, Joy of Painting, Arthur, Bill Nye, Barney, Teletubbies, etc.

It's not like there were a lot of TV choices for kids if their parents couldn't afford cable (and some stations like Cartoon Network didn't even exist until 1992+, I think even Disney Channel was a premium channel like HBO).

Like Sesame Street, Bob Ross was more famous than PBS. I didn’t even know what America was and I knew Bob Ross.

That's wild.

In the mid 90s when Bob Ross died, 95% of American preschoolers had seen Sesame Street, at the time a show not available anywhere besides PBS.

I present the evidence of Family Guy episode _Fifteen Minutes of Shame_ airdate April 25, 2000 which had a Bob Ross bit. Bob Ross was part of the cultural zeitgeist long before the 2010s Internet memes. That has brought a new generation to him, but that's just bringing GenZ in line with the others.

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