KnockBack: The Retro and Nostalgia Podcast

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 Renaissance of the '80s and '90s, and it still holds up wonderfully these few decades later...

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...

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...

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, one about loss, pain, choice, and consequences...

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 showcases the sheer amount of work and energy that went into making it...

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 much attention...

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 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 something totally different with our lives...

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...

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...