KnockBack: The Retro and Nostalgia Podcast Last Stand Media

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. But we thought we'd go in the other direction today, and talk about all the ways we love and appreciate our parents, how we think they helped form us into the people we are today, and add to the deep Moriarty lore that only grows by leaps and bounds here at Last Stand.
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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.
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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 awesome) is a quick read, and the film (which is good, but not nearly as good as the book) is comparatively short, too, so we figured we'd digest both, take lots of notes, and compare and contrast the two. The result is an interesting conversation, one that asks questions like: Is the book really fascist-aligned, as often claimed? Are the bugs the victims of human aggression, and could we ever come to terms with such a race? Does the idea of earning one's citizenship actually not sound that crazy, after all? Could every human have a deathwish, deep down inside? Clearly, we've much to discuss.
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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. Thus, what emerges is a robust talk about many of the games from our respective childhoods, and how we still grapple with their undeniable greatness to this day.
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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 score to acting performances to an oceanic foe that's rarely seen for technical reasons (greatly benefiting the movie!), everything works serendipitously, making Jaws one of the '70s most iconic and important films, and something we simply had to cover here on KnockBack.
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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 the first time, and -- god forbid! -- hungover. From Bud Heavies and Mike's Hard Lemonade to tequila and scotch... well... we may have been a little over our heads. Enjoy.
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