One intrigue of watching The Joy of Painting over multiple seasons was the challenge of piecing together what Bob Ross must’ve been like in his past life as a drill instructor. With countless offhand-and-yet-somehow-still-cryptic asides, he drew a stark mental image of a man whose job was to be “angry all the time” and “stomp around screaming at people.” Indeed, with those details in mind, it was far easier to understand why the guy would take a complete 180 in his life and spend all day, every day, finding the serenity of happy little clouds.
Still, the more iconic Ross became as “he of eternal even keel,” the more you wondered who that hard-nosed military man was. We don’t know if that was one of the UpIsNotJump crew’s concerns when they recreated ol’ Bob in Fallout IV‘s character customizer and edited clips of his art lessons to make this delightfully demented machinima… but that’s nevertheless one thing we got from it. It’s hilarious and hypnotic, watching the posthumously-dubbed “grand daddy of ASMR” go from slathering Titanium White with an arsenal of brushes to literally blasting Phthalo Blue onto the canvas with a burly BFG.
Suddenly, it’s much easier to see him as this stone-cold-calm commando who speaks softly and carries a big gun. And frankly, we’d want to call on this kind of stone-cold calm if ever we were looking for somebody to lead us out of Fallout‘s post-nuclear retro-Apocalypse. Watch on, look for the secret little trees, and see precisely what we mean below.
Did that clip tickle you? Well, there’s a lot more where that came from. UpIsNotJump has been getting a hell of a lot of mileage of Fallout IV‘s engine, re-creating the Suicide Squad trailer in-game, as well as Civil War‘s trailer, and even animating some Rick & Morty sketches with the same toolkit.
Any other machinima videos worth our notice? Drop your recs in the talkback. We’d love to feature them here.
Featured Image Credit: UpIsNotJump