KnockBack: The Retro and Nostalgia Podcast

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's about experience...

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 lot of Saul Goodman. Ted and the IRS (and his "Act of God"). Jesse's relapse...

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...

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 to cook meth...

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 liked returning to Rapture and getting more of that wonderfully-realized world...

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 heading to college just so he can hang out with his son: Back to School...

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...

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...

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 1985 Brat Pack film St...

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...