We're settling back in from Sacred Symbols 300 live in New York City, and the experience has us (The Brothers Moriarty) feeling nostalgic, which is a good thing for our retro-and-nostalgia-themed show. We're particularly sentimental about our parents, who both attended the show, and who -- at 73 years old, both -- have always come through for us, even if the path wasn't always linear, or even clear. We love making fun of our mom and dad on KnockBack; it's a staple of Dagan and Colin podcasts....

Dagan's best friend and Colin's other older brother finally arrives on the KnockBack scene to discuss skateboarding, video games, and growing up on the sometimes shady streets of Long Island. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With all of the hullabaloo surrounding Arrowhead's hit PS5 and PC game Helldivers 2, we figured we'd delve into its most obvious inspiration: Starship Troopers. Most people know Starship Troopers as the 1997 Paul Verhoeven sci-fi flick, but it's actually much more than that. It all started as an award-winning novel written back in 1959 by an author named Robert Heinlein, and strangely, the film and book couldn't possibly be more different in many respects. But because the book (which is...

For this week's KnockBack, we thought we'd do something a little bit different. A major fuel source for the origins of our podcast back in 2018 was our shared love of the NES: The hardware, its games, and the community that's long surrounded it. So we thought we'd delve back into that subject matter by each constructing a Top 10 NES Games list and then trying to fuse them together, a task we almost immediately abandoned when we realized we approached our respective lists quite differently....

1975's Jaws is a seminal work in the thriller genre, and it was somehow delivered by an overwhelmed, overworked, and over-his-head Steven Spielberg, directing only his second theatrically-released film. With a bloated budget more than twice as high as originally anticipated -- and filmed on-location with great difficulty, sending it more than three months beyond its planned schedule -- Jaws had everything working against it. But in the cauldron, something rather revolutionary cooked. From...

While we certainly neither condone nor encourage underage drinking, the reality is that both of us did plenty of it in our heyday. Indeed, drinking before you're 21 in the US is basically a rite of passage for generations of young people. (And yes, the drinking age should be 18.) And while we absolutely don't endorse our past behavior, we thought we would have some fun talking about our respective introductions to drinking: Trying our first beer, going to our first party, getting drunk for...

For our 'holiday' episode of KnockBack this year, we thought we'd do something special. As such, please welcome our mom to the show, BettyAnn Moriarty. The reality is this: Our mother comes up on the show constantly. In fact, if you guys are on social media, you may even interact with her. Needless to say, she's one of the most special people in our lives, and thus, we thought we'd take some time to reminisce, tell some old stories, ask probing questions about the past, and add to the...

For the Brothers Moriarty, Final Fantasy IV -- or Final Fantasy II, as we once knew it on SNES way back when -- is a uniquely nostalgic product. Upon its release in the west, we played the game together, often with me (Colin) sneaking into Dagan's room after I was 'put to bed' so I could watch him conquer the tale. Thus, we eagerly revisit this all-time JRPG classic in KnockBack style, but it's not the first time we've done so. Long-time listeners will recall that one of the very first KB...

For this week's episode of KnockBack, we thought we'd do things a little differently. Indeed, there's no specific topic to discuss per se. Instead, we thought we'd ask each other a few random questions about our respective childhoods to see where the conversation might lead. So let's get into the nitty-gritty about Dagan's most memorable youth sports triumph, Colin's frightened remembrances of the unnecessarily scary Unsolved Mysteries theme song, the GI Joe Dagan fruitlessly hunted down...

While KnockBack typically revolves around the video games, films, TV shows, and so on of the past, some of the most-popular and most-requested episodes of the show over the last six-ish years relate to Moriarty family stories. Today's release is one such episode. Using a certain recent wedding as a jumping-off point, we thought we'd go a level or two deeper and discuss the physics and chemistry of a typical family gathering in the Moriarty family, both yesterday and today. After all, endless...

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 dystopian sci-fi film RoboCop is considered more and more of a classic the further we get from its release year. Indeed, a lot of the ongoing revision pertaining to RoboCop has to do with its subject matter: Mega-corporations, militarism, the use of police force, and a mighty thick layer of satire that heavily lampoons American culture, past and present alike. On the outside, Peter Weller's portrayal of the titular mechanized law enforcement officer is merely a piece of...

Only a couple of months from when this episode of KnockBack launches, an Avatar-themed AAA game will launch from Ubisoft-owned studio Massive. And -- as you may already know -- I (Colin) am a fan of Massive, as I love their Division series. So when I heard they were making a Far Cry-like title that happens to be Avatar-themed, I knew I had to play it. But there was a glaring problem: I didn't know the source material. KnockBack seemed like a good place to concoct a remedy so that I could...

If you're an American gen-xer or millennial, there's a better-than-decent chance you were heavily influenced by MTV growing up. Launched in the early '80s, culturally crescendoing in the '90s, and still highly-relevant into the 2000s, MTV's brand of so-called 'music television' helped define a succession of generations' musical tastes, fashion, and the wider spectrum of entertainment full-stop. Today's episode of KnockBack is dedicated to MTV through the eyes of two people born in 1973 and...

If you're an older player of video games, you know that 2007 was an historically-insane year for the medium. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Super Mario Galaxy, BioShock, The Orange Box, God of War II, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and Mass Effect -- amongst others -- all launched within 9 months of each other. And then there was Halo 3, arguably the king of them all. Halo 3 is the Xbox brand's single best-selling game by a mile, and it's an emblem of Microsoft's most successful era both...

Welcome back to KnockBack! This week, instead of focusing-in on a specific game, movie, TV show, or whatever, we thought we'd do another one of our reminiscing episodes instead. Thus, today, our focus is card collecting. At different stages of his childhood, Dagan collected Star Wars cards, Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, and even caught the Smurfs bug. Colin, meanwhile, went through three distinct card-collecting phases: Sports (baseball and hockey), IP (Marvel Universe and GI Joe), and...

In 2022, we -- the Brothers Moriarty -- sat down to discuss Xbox's seminal 2001 launch offering, Halo: Combat Evolved. We loved it, and we promised that we'd get to Halo 2 one day. Well, today is that day. Released late in 2004, at the back-end of Xbox's truncated lifecycle, Halo 2 is widely-considered one of the Xbox brand's highest-quality and most important games in its two decade-plus history. And candidly, we can see why. With expert gunplay, a fun sci-fi story, and a brisk runtime...

As we continue our cruise through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters here on KnockBack, we come to the enigma that is Final Fantasy III. Like Final Fantasy II, III never got a western release at the time it came to Famicom in 1990. But unlike II, which finally saw the light of day in the west late in the PSone era, we had to wait until 2006 to play Final Fantasy III in western markets, and we did so via a 3D remake on Nintendo DS with a sterile and boring aesthetic overshadowing an otherwise...

There couldn't be a more appropriate film for us to cover here on KnockBack than Steven Spielberg's 1977 sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at least through a contemporary lens. After all, the United States government is seemingly on the cusp of spilling the beans about potentially decades-old cover-ups of encounters with alien technologies, and, well, Close Encounters deals with this very topic. Starring a young Richard Dreyfuss and scored by a still-seasoning John Williams,...

The great American author Cormac McCarthy recently passed away at the age of 89. In his decades as a writer, he penned a dozen novels, and we've actually covered a couple of them on this show in the past: The Road (Episode #78) and No Country For Old Men (Episode #233). In ode of such an inspirational and talented creator, we thought we'd thumb through what many consider his finest work, Blood Meridian. Written in 1985 -- before McCarthy was a truly known literary quantity, but nonetheless...

Sports flicks are beloved the world over for their relatable characters, uplifting stories, and remarkable endings. Disney's 1992 live-action hockey movie The Mighty Ducks is certainly no exception, though -- more than 30 years later -- there are a few bits that may not have gotten through the goalie (pardon the pun). The reality is this: The Mighty Ducks is arguably the greatest hockey movie ever, and one of the greatest children's sports films of all-time. It's also a movie that happens to...

Our meandering through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters continues with Final Fantasy II, widely considered the 'black sheep' of the traditional series. But a lot of that hinges on perception, or lack thereof. See, Final Fantasy II took forever to come to the west -- it came to Famicom in 1988 but never migrated outside of Japan until it launched on PSone in 2003 -- so the reality is, a lot of people don't have any experience with it at all. And those that do have played it in sometimes...

Few gaming franchises have had the staying power of Square's (and later Square Enix's) Final Fantasy. Launched in the waning weeks of 1987 in Japan, it took some two and a half years for the original title to migrate to western NES consoles, and while it sold fairly well, it still represented only a small spark that would set off a slow burn. Ultimately, that burn would turn into a raging fire -- Final Fantasies IV, VI, and VII are widely considered some of the strongest games ever made, and...

In the summer of 2005, a comedy hit theaters that surprised audiences: The 40 Year Old Virgin. The feature directorial debut of Judd Apatow -- previously best-known as a director, producer, and writer on TV projects like Freaks and Geeks and The Critic -- the film's title doesn't exactly belie its silly nature. But that's what's so fun and endearing about it. It's far from being the perfect comedy -- it has its notable weaknesses -- but it commands your attention with snappy writing, goofy...

It's time for us to talk about a bona fide classic! Super Mario Bros. 3 -- launched in 1988 on Japanese Famicoms and in 1990 on the NES -- is widely considered one of the greatest games of all-time. And it's true: SMB3 is a masterclass in gameplay, design, and intent. But above all else, it's fun. Really, really fun, just as fun today as it was decades ago. We're excited to gush about one of our favorite games of our youth, one rife with memories and stories to tell. Indeed, we'd argue that...