May the power of the cosmos be with you! Yes! Yes! Yes!!
July 10, 2017 9:04 PM   Subscribe

Long before Ghost Hunters, Dr. Franklin Ruehl (RIP 2015) was the host of the cable access, and then Sci-Fi Channel original program, Mysteries From Beyond The Other Dominion, among the first of the paranormal-focused shows on basic cable, and still the most fun. He lived long enough to reach SyFy's 20th anniversary, and described what it was like hosting one of their early productions. Not much survives, but here's an entire episode. There's more after the fold, so click here to extricate this post from its electronic prison:

For clicking through, your prize is ONE pat on the back, which you'll have to administer to yourself.

Dr. Ruehl (his degree was in physics) was obviously credulous, but brought a unique voice and style to the topics he covered. It was entertaining, and (occasionally) educational. Please consume these videos responsibly, in the presence of suitably perspective-altering substances, and don't take any of it too seriously. Roll tape!

Full episodes of the Sci-Fi Channel show ("Special thanks to New Tek [makers of Video Toaster] and Commodore Business Machines")
The Vimana - Momo, the Missouri Monster - Virgil's Fly - Spontaneous Human Combustion - The Ghost of Nathan Hale - Arcosanti, Town of the Future - Galileo's Blindness & Bunsen's Chemical Accidents - The Death of the Dinosaurs
Atlantis - Billy the Kid - Dinosaurs
Death in the Civil War - How to Photograph a UFO
Public Access: Do Ghost Galaxies Exist? - Part 2 - Part 3

Individual bits: The straw in the potato trick ("Gy-eee!")
Public access - In 2008 - Getting booed on America's Got Talent - Near the end of his life

His final reports: More can be found on Dr. Ruehl's YouTube channel Dr. Ruehl was a prolific blogger on Huffington Post and Blogger.

So, let's see what else is in the black bag today....

Special Bonus #1: Sci-Fi Buzz!
Sci-Fi Buzz! The Sci-Fi Channel's weekly movie, TV and pop-culture infoshow. Reminder: attitudes and opinions given are not mine (especially in the case of Harlan Ellison's editorial segment). Here's an episode of Sci-Fi Trader, the channel's short-lived home shopping program:
First episode

Special Bonus #2: Awesome Sci-Fi Channel Bumpers & Ads!
Pre-launch test pattern
The launch of the Sci-Fi Channel
Sci-Fi Channel Sign-On(?) (Very weird)
Weird happenings promo
This is Sci-Fi
Movie intros
Promos, including Messages From The Future

Special Bonus #3: FTL Newsfeed!
The Sci-Fi Channel used to have this awesome serial commercial thing called FTL Newsfeed, a short promotional segment posing as a newsbreak from the future. Here is a compilation playlist of FTL segments. It's 124 videos long!
posted by JHarris (15 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Program title has ghosted.
posted by Artw at 9:07 PM on July 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hmm, shows up on desktop not mobile.
posted by Artw at 9:39 PM on July 10, 2017


Reuhl was such a great, lovable weirdo. I'm sad to hear he's passed on, but I like to imagine that he and his desk are now eternally soaring through the cosmos together.

Looking at his IMDB page, I had no idea he had such a busy career as an actor in so many movies and shows, with a broad range of roles that included Groucho Marx, Hitler, "Alien Tourist" and "Ping Pong Parlor Habitue". (I'm kind of amazed he never turned up for a cameo on The X-Files!)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 9:50 PM on July 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


Ah, the title is done using fancy Unicode letters. I thought by this point most people would be able to read them. It was probably a bit presumptuous to use them in the post. Those characters could be changed to just "Mysteries From Beyond The Other Dominion", if a mod likes.
posted by JHarris at 10:04 PM on July 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


That IMDB entry is a bit weird, he's not listed as the host of MfBtOD there. I actually had no idea he'd been in so many things, there's little to indicate that from the things I'd read. I kind of wonder if more than one Franklin Ruehl are getting mixed up there?

It might be worth tracking down some of his appearances. He's been in Always Sunny in Philidephia twice according to that page, maybe start there?
posted by JHarris at 10:09 PM on July 10, 2017


Mod note: Edited the font for the program's title, carry on
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:31 PM on July 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is like getting yelled at by Stan Lee about saucer mysteries. It's great.
posted by Artw at 12:06 AM on July 11, 2017


Excellent use of "morphing" technology at the 2 minute mark on that first one.
posted by Artw at 12:08 AM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


I aspire to being this weird.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:21 AM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


Oh my god, why did I just see this post just as I am about to leave work!

I obsessively watched Mysteries From Beyond The Other Dominion! I still think of it fondly!

It's better than a slap on the belly with a wet trout!

(Oh man, I am going to rush home and totally dig into all of these links. Thank you!)
posted by Katemonkey at 9:31 AM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


So I had my nostalgia YouTube bender and now I can talk about how much Mysteries from Beyond the Other Dominion meant to me.

I was that kid who loved crazy wonderful paranormal and otherworldly things. I watched In Search Of... and That's Incredible and always Unsolved Mysteries and read Fate! magazine and compendiums of Ripley's Believe It Or Not and Into The Unknown. It was all about crystal skulls and UFOs and mummies and Time-Life Series and a nerdy girl who couldn't get enough of any of it.

I'm a teenager and living with my grandmother and the cable gets Sci-Fi, which is freakin' awesome, because I'm a giant Star Trek nerd, and then I discover this show.

This amazing show.

This show where this weird old man talks about all the things I'm interested in. All the ghosts and aliens and mysterious deaths and cursed objects and that's better than a slap on the belly with a wet trout!

(And I can't believe I still hear Dr. Ruehl's voice in my head when I type that.)

I loved it. I loved the public-access quality of it. I loved the effects. I loved the nonsense.

Now I just read Fortean Times and tell people about Elmer McCurdy.

If they ever put it up anywhere, I'd spend hours re-watching it, utterly delighted and being back to that dweeb all those years ago.
posted by Katemonkey at 12:48 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm feeling a bit bad about putting the Sci-Fi Buzz and other Sci-Fi Channel stuff into this post as bonus stuff. I think it could possibly stand alone. If you haven't already, go back and look at that extra stuff. The FTL newsfeed all by itself is worthy of a post, I think.

Dr. Ruehl seems like he was a cool guy. It's easy to make fun of him, and I was greatly trying not to when I put the post together. I cringe at the America's Got Talent link, not because of Dr. Ruehl's performance, but at everyone leaping at the opportunity to dump on him. And I am still amazed that he had such a long career as an extra in stuff! Many of the later posts on his YouTube channel are him doing voice auditions. I wonder if he had any success at that? The fact that his posts just stopped suddenly, around the time of that blog post I linked announcing his death, causes me to wonder if it had been something sudden.

In any case, farewell Dr. Franklin Ruehl. If we had met we wouldn't have agreed on a lot of things, I'm sure. But I'm glad I got to watch your show. I might have to make "Gyeee" a favored Random Word of mine.
posted by JHarris at 12:02 AM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is amazing. I was super into this stuff in the 90s, but somehow I never ran across this guy.

It's probably just my own perception, but I miss when crankery was this weird instead of just being right-wing propaganda. More Art Bell, less Alex Jones.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:26 PM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


(Hold the David Icke, though.)
posted by tobascodagama at 2:43 PM on July 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Man, the whole "is it lizards" tango of the Ickester... yeah, better off out of that.
posted by Artw at 3:12 PM on July 13, 2017


« Older Modernist Architecture (not Art Deco!) in Eritrea   |   Gun Squids Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments