Retro Ridoctopus

Having worked for Bally Midway in the 1980s, game designer / artist / animator Brian F. Colin has created and worked on more classic arcade games than you can shake a giant mutant wolfman at! RAMPAGE, XENOPHOBE, ARCH RIVALS, PIGSKIN 621ad, GENERAL CHAOS and RAMPAGE WORLD TOUR, just to name a few! Brian infused each of these games with the sardonic wit of MAD Magazine, while ensuring each of these...

2025 ended with a truly unthinkable tragedy that we are all still reeling from. Retro Ridoctopus could think of no better way to pay tribute to the great Rob Reiner, than by dedicating the first episode of season 8 to those films of his that have brought us so much joy for so many decades. From tense courtrooms, to the Cliffs of Insanity and the thousand laughs and tears in between, we each picked...

All tentacles are in the air as we reflect on and celebrate another successful season of the Retro Ridoctopus cephalopodcast! After copious amounts of reminiscing over another amazing year, we dive into our annual final topic. Like every year, we asked you for voice mails, giving your quick reviews of a classic movie you watched for the first time this year. Every single year, this block gets long...

If your purple tentacles are tingling, that might just be because our pal Nintenjoe joined us for NUMEROUS playthroughs of the classic LucasArts point and click adventure game Maniac Mansion! Seriously, this one has a ton of different ending and we got almost all of em! So watch out for falling meteors and get that hamster in the microwave because things are about to get WEIRD. RETRO RIDOCTOPUS is...

For our last regular episode of season 7, we are talking about a childhood experience everyone out there can relate to. Sitting down with a big box of crayons and a coloring book! With the help of guest host Christine (AKA Mrs. Parasite), we'll share a bit of history on the Crayola company before diving into some colorful childhood memories revolving around crayons. Get ready for some personal col...

Tonight, in the BRIG, we are thrilled to welcome back an incredible guest from all the way across the pond! Simon Bestwick is an accomplished as well as prolific British contemporary horror author, whose acclaimed work includes the novels Black Mountain, Hell’s Ditch, The Devil’s Highway and Wolf’s Hill as well as numerous short short collections such as 2020’s “And Cannot Come Again: Tales of Chi...

It's time to play the music... It's time to light the lights... It's time to meet the Muppets on Ridoctopus Tonight! Your host of the moment Coopster Gold has a backstage pass to the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational show around! For this episode, we celebrate some of our favorite all time characters from Jim Henson's The Muppets! We're talking Frogs, Pigs, Dogs and all the wacky What...

Double, double, toil and trouble... fire burn and cauldron... (well you know). With the help of our be-broomed co-host Greenie (AKA The Green Witch of the Shire) we squeeze one last episode into the spooky season! This one is all about movies involving witches! We're talking mean ones, green ones and even seldom seen ones! Some are sort of nice, but some will turn smelly little children into mice!...

The legendary Ellen Datlow has been called “the venerable queen of horror anthologies” per the New York Times, and with over 40 years in the business, it's not hard to see why! Returning to the podcast, Ellen has brought two amazing authors from her new horror anthology, "Night & Day" from Simon & Schuster! Kari Sanders and Parasite Steve get to chat with Rachel Harrison and Kaar...

This episode is not for the faint of heart, nor the weak of mind... For our second spooky episode of 2025, we tackle the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft--and we do it through the lens of... well, a LENS! We've picked six Lovecraft inspired films to raise from the unknowable depths. Three direct adaptations of his stories, and three more that are what has come to be known colloquially as... LOVECR...

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 ------...