KnockBack: The Retro and Nostalgia Podcast

There are a few holidays each year that attract near-ubiquitous participation -- think New Years Eve and the like -- but there's one such day that's especially strange: Halloween. The last day of each October is 24 hours dedicated to monsters, ghosts, and other scares... and lots of candy and peculiar costumes, too. As children, of course, Halloween takes on an extra-special dimension, but as we g...

Divorce is a horrific experience for everyone involved. Spouses falling out of love is brutal, and children -- especially young kids -- end up as collateral damage. Such is the story of the 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer, starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep as a couple on the outs, with a young son caught in the middle. Kramer vs. Kramer is a notable picture because, in 1980, it won the Academy...

When you're a child (or even a teenager), your mind is malleable, like a piece of clay. This is where the nature versus nurture argument often comes into play, because it's really those around us, those who help mold and form us, that make us who we are. Once we're jettisoned into the world as an adult, it's those formidable encounters, relationships, and even instances of hero worship that truly...

There's something special about Spider-Man. Is it his New York roots? Possibly. His intelligence and diligence? Maybe. His sense of family, community, and justice? Certainly. But in the realm of comics, Spider-Man happens to be different characters at different times, something the Academy Award-winning 2018 animated film Into the Spider-Verse so successfully celebrates. By melding Peter Parker(s)...

By the time the '80s rolled around, the Cold War was just about over. The Soviet Union was slowly-but-surely crumbling, and the threat posed by Mutually Assured Destruction was waning by the year. That's what makes movies like 1984's American action classic Red Dawn so interesting. In its alternate history tale, the USSR expands its sphere of power through Central and South America, while NATO dis...

It's time to wrap up our three-episode run of Breaking Bad analysis with a deep dive into the beloved series' final season, as well as its surprise epilogue movie that came some six years later. The culmination of Walt's journey dominates Season 5, yet in El Camino, we finally get to see what happened with Jesse, too. There's much to discuss here: Madrigal, Todd, the Aryan Brotherhood, the fate of...

The ethereal world of dreams has long fascinated humans (and our human-like ancestors) going back many millennia. In fact, when you really think about it, we kinda collectively take dreams for granted, as scholars and academics try to get to the bottom of why we (and seemingly all mammals, at the very least) dream while asleep. This episode of KnockBack isn't about the science, though. Instead, it...

While Episode 130 of KnockBack was dedicated to the first two seasons of AMC's crime drama Breaking Bad, this episode of our podcast is in ode to the show's third and fourth seasons, when things really start to get hairy. In these seasons, we have The Cousins. A ratcheting up of the danger surrounding working with Gus and the Mexican cartels. The car wash. Tons of contextual flashbacks. A whole lo...

When Christopher Nolan's Inception came to theaters a decade ago, it impressed moviegoers with a bizarre sci-fi story that -- in true Nolan fashion -- felt grounded and believable. In fact, it's one of the best-received films of 2010, an Academy Award-winning mind-melter all about entering people's dreams in order to acquire restricted, secretive, and sensitive information. But what if you could p...

Breaking Bad is widely considered one of the greatest television dramas of the 21st century (and possibly ever). Released in the same era as Mad Men and The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad didn't only help put AMC back on the map as a respected TV channel, but gave us insight into an increasingly sinister world with a simple premise: A high school chemistry teacher and his burnout ex-student teaming up...

Whether in television, movies, books, or games, it's always hard to follow-up a smash-hit with a worthy sequel. But publisher 2K endeavored to do just that when it launched BioShock 2 in 2010, doing so -- mind you -- without the series' creative visionary Ken Levine, whose team was off working on what would become 2013's BioShock Infinite. The result was divisive at the time, though most people li...

For nearly five decades, Rodney Dangerfield was an American comedy legend. But it was in the 1980s that he rose to mainstream prominence not through his stand-up act as popularized on late-night TV in the '60s and '70s, but because of films like Caddyshack and Easy Money. Come 1986, however, Dangerfield would star in perhaps his strangest movie yet, a zany romp all about a wealthy businessman head...

Robert Eggers' 2015 debut film The Witch isn't exactly old, but its subject matter certainly is. Taking place in the early 1630s in New England -- a full 60 years before the Salem Witch Trials -- The Witch tells the story of a banished family of devout Puritans who go into the Massachusetts woods to live alone. And... well... you may be able to guess what happens next. Written entirely in period E...

Ignorance is bliss, or so the saying goes. But when we're kids, ignorance is also a way of life. In our tiny worlds, everything was magnified or understated: The glorious ups, our mundane everyday lives, and especially the seemingly-tragic downs. Little did we know then what we would learn later: That a lot of what we cared so deeply about didn't matter very much, that the stuff we should have pai...

We recently lost American filmmaker Joel Schumacher to cancer at the age of 80. With a diverse filmography dating back to the '70s and running through to just a few years ago, it's hard to put Schumacher in a box, but it seems a lot of people wanted to memorialize him by focusing on his two maligned Batman movies instead of the great work he did. To pay him tribute, we decided to go back to his 19...

When Mass Effect launched on Xbox 360 in 2007, it promised to be not only one of the most ambitious RPGs of all time, but the entry point to one of the most ambitious gaming trilogies ever. Designed as three games from the get-go, the original Mass Effect propelled Commander Shepard and his team into the galactic intrigue that would engulf the games-long story, but it also ended up doing something...

Writer and director Quentin Tarantino has long been a divisive and controversial filmmaker, primarily because of his seeming, unapologetic glorification of gore. But something deeper typically rests beneath his portrayal of human brutality. This is perhaps most true in his 2012 picture Django Unchained, a movie that takes place in the Southern United States on the brink of the Civil War. And while...

There are times when an older movie feels like it could have been made yesterday. 1989's Do the Right Thing -- one of Spike Lee's very first films -- is just such an offering. Based in the racially-mixed Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn during one hot summer day and night, Do the Right Thing is ostensibly about a group of black people (children, teens, and adults) and their daily experiences, par...

We've been recording KnockBack week-in and week-out for more than two years, and while we tell lots of stories about our time with video games, TV shows, movies, toys, and much more, we also include mentions of some very important people: Our childhood friends. These folks aren't just random characters from our past; they're people who helped shape who we were then, and still are today. To celebra...

Nintendo is undoubtedly best-known for its long-running, ubiquitous franchises: Mario, Zelda, and the like. But sprinkled in the mega-selling mixture are games that sold far less, but have earned their own level of reverence. EarthBound -- launched in 1994 in Japan and 1995 in the US -- is one such adventure. Known as Mother 2 in Japan (the original Mother was a Famicom game that didn't see wester...

Did Disney's Star Wars trilogy end with a loud bang or a resounding thud? It depends on who you ask, of course. But just late last year (in 2019), the new galactic journey that began with Episode VII ended with Episode IX, and the results were about as divisive as you'd probably imagine. Mired by rewrites, production problems, roving directors, and the death of an iconic actor, The Rise of Skywalk...

Do you know the definition of insanity? After playing 2012's Far Cry 3, you just might. While this open world FPS series began inauspiciously enough under the direction of none other than Crytek, it's when Ubisoft brought the shooter franchise in-house that it truly began to shine. And it perhaps shines brightest with its third core entry, one that takes place on the fictional Rook Islands in the...

For Americans, the year 1776 is sacred. It isn't the year the American Revolution started (that's 1775), nor is it the year it ended in victory (that's 1783). Instead, '76 represents the year the US declared its independence from England, changing the course of domestic and global history alike forever. The 2000 film The Patriot -- starring Mel Gibson and the late, great Heath Ledger -- is one of...

This week's episode of KnockBack is a special one, not only because of its subject matter -- the 1982 Steven Spielberg smash-hit film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial -- but because our guest host this week is none other than Dagan's wife, Helene. E.T. was, is, and will likely always be one of the most seminal movies ever created, and it's because it has what so many other pictures all-too-often lack:...

The Powerpuff Girls might seem like an unassuming piece of animation... yet it's anything but. Nestled within the soul of Cartoon Network's hit show is a surprising amount of depth, an amalgamation of influences ranging from anime to gaming to old superhero TV shows. The result is one of the most charming cartoons of the last 30 years. The adventures of Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles -- three fiv...