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How the long-dead public-television painter Bob Ross became a streaming phenomenon (and kicked up plenty of dirt in the process)

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  1. AugustusFerdinand
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    The space houses the roughly dozen employees of Bob Ross Inc., which controls its namesake’s likeness and steers its future, fielding the numerous licensing suitors who blow up its suburban phone lines. Run by a little-known family-business executive named Joan Kowalski, the firm has turned a public-television painter who died 26 years ago into a supremely unlikely hero of the digital video age.

    It also, according to its critics, has provided a cautionary tale of how aggressiveness and lawsuits can be used to steal a legacy.

    On Aug. 25, Netflix will drop a new documentary on its service. The title — “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed” — makes no bones about the impression it leaves.

    The film, the synopsis says, is the “shockingly untold story” of Ross’s afterlife, “a sinister tale surrounding his name and the empire that was built on it being hijacked by once trusted partners, whose slow betrayal of him continued beyond his death in 1995.”

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