KnockBack: The Retro and Nostalgia Podcast

Comedian and actor Mike Myers has always been a bit of an enigma. The hilarious Canadian made his bones on Saturday Night Live and drew international acclaim for his Wayne's World skits and films, but it was 1997's James Bond spoof Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery that might be his most famous and most beloved work. Playing both the movie's protagonist (the titular Austin Powers) and an...

We live in a golden age of television, but even some of the best series stick around too long. Unlike many of its contemporaries, though, HBO has a good habit of identifying ideas that don't need to linger, and while True Detective has three seasons, they're all detached from one another. The first season -- running eight episodes back in early 2014 -- is widely considered one of the best miniseri...

The ocean is a mysterious and even scary place, but in Disney's 1989 classic animated film The Little Mermaid, it's pretty damn awesome. That's what makes protagonist Ariel's insistence on leaving her home waters for the world above so confounding... that is until she falls in love and finds the perfect excuse to live her dream. The Little Mermaid was the first film in the so-called Disney Renaiss...

Few modern filmmakers are more popular, beloved, controversial, and even reviled than Quentin Tarantino. When he got his start in the early '90s with the cult classic Reservoir Dogs, no one could have predicted his meteoric rise in the American and global movie industries, but it's his 2009 flick Inglourious Basterds that's perhaps his most popular offering. Inglourious Basterds tells an alternate...

Today, Rocksteady is one of the most famous game developers on the planet, but back in 2009, they were basically unknown. With only one obscure PS2 game under their belt, the British team was met with an enticing challenge: Make a good Batman title. Turns out, such a task is easier said than done, but Rocksteady rose to the occasion. 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of the very best licensed ga...

It's true: We would have never chosen to do this topic on our own. But when our beloved audience voted on Patreon to hear this discussion, we simply had to oblige. In 1992, the Moriarty Brothers' parents split. In the wake of that event, our lives were reshaped forever. This isn't an uplifting episode of KnockBack by any stretch of the imagination, but it's most certainly a candid and honest one,...

The so-called run-and-gunner Cuphead is hands down one of the most beautiful video games ever created. Crafted in the spirit of the rubber hose cartoon stylings of the 1920s and 1930s, Cuphead is a rarity in the modern industry: It's drawn and animated by hand, and it's brutally (and we mean brutally) difficult. It's also charming, artfully designed, funny, and full of lush detail that truly showc...

No matter who you are (unless you were born on February 29th!), your birthday rolls around once a year, every year, without fail. That's how calendars work, after all. What you do with that most sacred of days is, of course, entirely up to you and yours, but in our younger years, birthdays tended to mean a whole lot. There were presents, cake, family, friends, and a ton of attention. (Possibly too...

The infamous Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars films left a bad taste in many enthusiasts' mouths, particularly those who have been fans of the space opera franchise going back to the '70s and '80s. That's why it was so amazingly exciting when -- in 2015 -- Star Wars appeared primed to return to form with a JJ Abrams-led movie that had the entire galaxy eager to see what happens next. The result was so...

The Brothers Moriarty ended up with pretty awesome jobs, one of us in the gaming industry, the other in animation. But it's also true that, in our younger years, we aspired to some other professions. We ultimately found our way towards what makes us happy, but there were deviations along the way, and this week's episode of KnockBack is dedicated to the what-ifs that could have had us doing somethi...

New York City has long been one of the world's most important and renown cities... it just wasn't a very nice place to be for a few decades in between World War II and the 21st century. The seminal 1979 picture The Warriors captures NYC's decay and despair through a unique lens of youth and camp, and it does so with great visual flair, solid acting, and a surprising story that actually asks an int...

With thousands upon thousands (upon thousands!) of video games released since the 1970s, it's easy for some (well... many) to fall through the cracks. Very few are seminal titles that helped to define their era, genre, or hardware. Yet, 1997's Final Fantasy VII is undoubtedly one of the most important games ever released. It brought JRPGs from niche to mainstream, put Squaresoft on the map for mil...

They say that nothing's better than mom's home cooking (and in the Moriarty's case, that's very true). But when we're young, we seem to have an insatiable appetite for fast food. McDonald's. Burger King. Taco Bell. Whatever junk we could shove in our fat faces, we wanted. And the worst thing that could happen is hearing our parents say, "but we have food at home!" What a deathblow that was. A deat...

The 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix was released at an interesting inflection point in the history of nerd culture. It launched at a time when -- with the help of Star Wars' resurgence, the soon-to-be-released Lord of the Rings movies, and others -- dorkiness went mainstream, and The Matrix might have been the straw that broke the camel's back, in this regard. The story of Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity,...

It seems like only yesterday that we launched our retro and nostalgia podcast KnockBack, and yet it's been nearly two years since our maiden voyage. A hundred weeks on, we've naturally arrived at our 100th episode, and to celebrate, we thought we'd talk about our greatest shared love: Video games. More specifically, we thought we'd talk about 100 games we absolutely adore, 100 games any aficionado...

In 2017, EA shuttered its fully-owned studio Visceral, which bummed a lot of people out, since they were developing a Star Wars game. But back in 2008, before they were called Visceral -- when the team was known by the more quaint moniker EA Redwood Shores -- the talented NorCal developer launched Dead Space, one of the most beloved survival horror adventures ever created. Taking place in the 26th...

Nothing pleases grandma and grandpa more than spoiling their grandchildren. Indeed, it's the key rule of Grandparenting (made up word!). The most blessed among us get four of these mystical beings from which to learn from, be fed by, and circumvent the rules with, and the rest of us make do with perhaps one, two, or three. For the sometimes lengthy and other times brief periods we're lucky enough...

In 1897, a most unusual British novel was written by an at-the-time unknown author named Bram Stoker. It was simply called Dracula, and for most western readers, it was their introduction into the centuries-long mythology, mysticism, and straight-up horror stories coming from Eastern Europe and surrounding environs, tales of men and women who would feast on the blood of others, and who may even be...

John Carpenter hit a bit of a home run with The Thing back in 1982, though contemporary critics didn't give him or his movie any shine. In fact, his film's reception was so bleak that it kinda-sorta destroyed Carpenter's career... at least for a while. But hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and with nearly four decades to marinate on it, many people have come around to The Thing's seminal place in h...

For many of us, going to church (or temple, or mosque, or whatever) was a part of childhood. And while some of us got something useful out of our often-weekly visits, the most lingering memories tend to revolve around everything but what we were actually supposed to be there for. The parental bribery. The coercion. The distractions. Time moving so slowly that it's as if you're stuck in one of thos...

For thousands of years, humans have been smoking, eating, and enjoying the fruits (well, buds) of the marijuana plant, also known as cannabis. Once associated with deviant behavior and long mislabeled as a gateway drug, marijuana -- like virtually any other substance, legal or illegal -- has different effects on different people, and while certainly not a positive for some, many others the world '...

Pawnee, Indiana doesn't actually exist, but after watching Parks & Rec on NBC, many of us wish that it did. That's because Pawnee is full of some of the most hilarious, charming, and ridiculous characters in modern TV history, and their antics offered more accessible and often kind-hearted takes when compared to its far more vulgar and out-of-control sister show The Office. What resulted is someth...

In what will undoubtedly be an ongoing, years-and-episodes-long saga, we've decided to talk about some of our very favorite songs, a nice complement to Episodes 39 and 56 of KnockBack, which were all about our most beloved albums and concert experiences. Narrowing songs down is a lot harder, of course, but we did our absolute best, coming up with two lists of 10 tracks each that best represent our...

The original PlayStation completely dominated its generation. So did PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 4. PlayStation 3, on the other hand, fought tooth-and-nail for every single unit its pushed, and its particular battle -- waged against Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii -- ended up being Sony's most perilous corporate period in decades. In fact, PlayStation 3 ended up costing Sony nearly $2 bi...

In middle school and high school, the house party -- or your local equivalent -- was a rite of passage. It's when you got away from the doldrums of secondary academia, socialized with your peers away from the prying ears and curious eyes of teachers and parents, and perhaps even indulged in some age-inappropriate pastimes. Indeed, it's all a tale as old as growing up itself. Today's episode of Kno...