Retro Ridoctopus

We welcome back New York Times Best Selling Author, Thomas Sniegoski (author of the Herculoids comics and the bestselling The Fallen series of novels), and Jeannine Acheson (co-author of Vampiverse comics) to chat about their HOTLY ANTICIPATED dark-fantasy novella! "Nira: A Constance Evermore Story" is out now from Bad Hand Books and is gorgeously illustrated by Thomas Brown! Order NIRA...

Hey gang! Fire up those ascots and tie off your Mystery Machines because it's time to dive back into the topic of everyone's favorite mystery-solving scaredy dog... Scooby Doo! This time, we are focusing on a few of the nearly 50 Scooby movies. Whether they were released on TV, VHS, DVD, streaming or theatrically, they all count. We each pick two to spotlight and, as usual, get thick into the weed...

About 100 episodes ago, we recorded Ep 060: Nintendo Hard / The Triumphant Return of Nintenjoe where we discussed some NES games that we loved despite their extreme levels of difficulty. Tonight, we are dipping back into that topic with the awesome Mike Levy from the Dongled channel on YouTube . We've got a whole new crop of tough as nails games for ya, and this time we decided to widen the scope...

This week, all your BASE are belong to Retro Ridoctopus! We are celebrating the crown jewel of any action figure toy line! Whether you called it a base, playset, headquarters, or battle station... we all drooled over those commercials. Begging our parents to pony up even more cash so we could bring a little piece of our action figures' world home! He-Man had Castle Grayskull and the Thundercats ha...

Legendary comedic actor John Candy left us on March 4th, 1994 at the age of 43, much to the dismay of his millions of fans. To help celebrate his life and career, we have a returning guest-host and John Candy super-fan, Retroid and co-host of the Spooky Picture Show , Raina Madison ! We each picked 2 of our favorite Candy films to spotlight, but knowing us, it's a safe bet we'll mention way more t...

Love him or hate him, the career of John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne was one for the ages. With the help of our pals Synopsis Grim and Portland Maine's own, DJ Rick Johnson , we'll hop on a crazy train and journey across five decades—spotlighting five albums from the solo career of heavy metal's one and only Prince of Darkness. Along the way, we'll share plenty about each track and what list...

This week, down in the slimy, ever-squirming blackness of the BRIG, we have the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of such acclaimed horror as Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Kill Your Darling, Stay on the Line, What Kind of Mother, Ghost Eaters and much much more… he’s two parts Vonnegut, one part Ellison… and like nine more parts tornado made of crazed weasels... it's Clay McLeod...

For another "Couch Bro-Op", Parasite Steve and 8-Bit Alchemy play through one of the most criminally under appreciated titles on the NES. The Guardian Legend was released in 1988, and to this day, there's still nothing like it! This hybrid action-adventure/shoot 'em up game was developed by Compile—a company who has quite the pedigree when it comes to vertical shooting games. You take co...

We welcome back Randy Carter (from Swarm of Comics) for a soaring discussion on the Golden and Silver Ages of superhero comics! The Golden Age of comic books in the United States spanned 1938 to 1956, beginning with the 1938 debut of Superman in Action Comics #1. And the Silver Age is generally considered to span 1956 to 1970. That period began with the publication of DC Comics' Showcase #4 (Octob...

For this episode of THE BRIG, we are joined by the writing team of Jesse Scoble and Devinder Thiara who rode in from the Great White North to promote their new weird western comic, DEAD MONEY! Jesse is an award-winning game writer with credits on: Assassin’s Creed Origins & Odyssey, Far Cry 5, Watch Dogs 2, HyperScape, and Wizard101. TTRPG work includes A Game of Thrones d20, the Marvel Multiv...

For this episode, we get in touch with our softer sides... Get ready to hear a handful of super rad GIRL TOYS that go way beyond playing with dolls. Properties like the Care Bears, My Little Pony and Rainbow Brite have been slapped on as many things as He-Man or the Transformers over the years, and have had just as many reboots. And while we may mention the cartoons, our focus here is on the TOYS!...

RELOAD!! RELOAD!! PER-KANNG!! Whether you're aiming your NES Zapper at some 8-bit ducks or feeding quarters into an arcade to head-shot some video zombies, you're experiencing the white-knuckled action of a niche sub-genre of video games known as a LIGHT GUN GAMES or ON RAILS SHOOTERS!! Tonight, with the help of our old buddy, Nintenjoe, we'll spotlight some personal favorites! We start with belov...

With the help of our pal Scott Clevenger (from The Slumgullion podcast) we dish all about four stylish 90's action/adventure films that were looking to the pulps of the 30s for inspiration! These movies featured heroic characters from a bygone era of pulp magazines, comic strips and serials! We'll each present one of the four films while diving into their pulpy origins. By the time these films wer...

This week, down in that rusted out hull we call the BRIG… we are honored to have New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-winning author, Christopher Golden! Chris is the author of such novels as Snowblind, Road of Bones, Ararat, The House of Last Resort, 13 Buffy The Vampire Slayer novels and more comics than you can shake a RIGHT HAND OF DOOM at! Since his debut in 1994 (with "Of Sa...

Coopster Gold takes us back to our Amazing Animal Facts theme from last season, but with a twist! This time we only picked those creatures who have sadly joined the ranks of the EXTINCT. We decided to leave the dinosaurs out of it, focusing on such fantastic beasts as Mighty Moas, Tasmanian Tigers, Woolly Rhinos and, of course, the poster animal for extinction, the Dodo. RETRO RIDOCTOPUS is ------...

This time in the BRIG, we have an enormously talented artist, graphic designer and author of the novels Blood For The Sun, All The Dead Men, Lightning Wears a Red Cape and his brand new one: The Queen of Saturn and the Prince in Exile! All that and he’s a former Marine, a black belt in Krav Maga.. It’s Boston’s own… Errick Nunnally! The Queen of Saturn and the Prince in Exile is a Black nerd comin...

Retroids, start your engines! This episode is all about driving and racing games! We're talking arcades, Atari, Super Nintendo, the N64, and into the era of Playstation and X-Box! As long as the game puts you behind the wheel, it counts! Along for the ride is our old pal and former host of the Retro Ridoctopus cephalopodcast, Synopsis Grim AKA BOSS RUSH MODE!! So buckle up and floor that gas pedal...

Val Kilmer was an actor's actor. The rare sort of movie star whose focus was always on creating the best performance possible. Even when not the leading man, he through himself into every role, always elevating what had been written on the page into something special. Over the course of an impressive 30 year career, Val was shaped by the Hollywood machine into a bonafied movie star. From lighter f...

This week, down in the eldritch unknown of the BRIG… we have returning guest, Cat Scully! A talented artist, video game developer, writer and novelist … Cat is the author of Jennifer Strange and comes back to chat all about her hotly anticipated novel BELOW THE GRAND HOTEL! We’ve got the roaring 20s, flapper dresses, Ziegfeld Girls... Faustian bargains, mouths where there shouldn’t be mouths...you...

Between 1980 and 2010, a total of eleven SNL movies were produced. Some are great, others are far from it and there are plenty in between. But love em or pan em, these comedies were foundational viewing for many of us who grew up in the 90s and beyond! In this episode, Coop continues his Saturday Night Live theme and we spotlight a total of of our personal favorite SNL films, including the really...

Hiya, Toonsters! Parasite Steve and 8-Bit Alchemy had a totally toontastic time re-playing some classic Tiny Toon Adventures video games, and you're gonna hear about it! This is a property that produced more games than you realize and some of them are absolutely worth any retro gamer's time! Covered meticulously in this episode are: • Tiny Toon Adventures (NES) • Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in...

LIVE FROM (somewhere on the internet) IT'S (a podcast about) SATURDAY NIGHT!!! Saturday Night Live is more than a TV show, it's an American institution. As much a part of our lives as apple pie and cutting people off at intersections. Now in it's 50th season, the show is older than any of the Octo-hosts, but that just means that it's been a staple for our entire lives! For this first part of 2 SNL...

Morgan Sylvia is an author from Maine with numerous published works including novels, short stories, poetry collections and everything in between. Whether she's writing long or short form, one thing is clear, the quality of the prose itself is always top of mind. This lends a musical quality to the language of her work. A poetic fingerprint that most authors never achieve. In other words, you shou...

Building on our Real Ghostbusters episode, we decided to not only focus on the sequel to that legendary cartoon, but spotlight three major animated series the helped shaped the 90s! Drew Mollo (from Splash Pages) is back for the second week in a row, as we tackle The Extreme Ghostbusters, Men In Black The Series and Godzilla The Series! Aside from all being continuations of popular sci-fi/action m...

Who you gonna call? Why, Drew Mollo (from the Splash Pages podcast) that's who! As a lifelong Ghostbusters super-fan, Drew has spent years memorizing Tobin's Spirit Guide and definitely knows how to read a P.K.E. Meter. A good thing too, because for this episode, we're be spotlighting 8 episodes from this seminal animated series! Expect plenty of Peter, Ray, Egon, Winston as well as a few buckets...