The PopCult Blog began in 2005 as part of The Charleston Gazette‘s “Gazz” multimedia website.  One of the inaugural “Gazzblogs,” PopCult became nationally-recognized while retaining much of its local interest. 

Since day one, Rudy Panucci has been the sole author of PopCult. Charged with covering anything related to pop culture, Rudy used his experience as a disc jockey, speech writer, comic book writer, artist and editor, animation columnist, action figure expert, toy industry consultant, trading card expert and life spent as a student of comedy, cool stuff and weirdness to create a unique and personal blog that covered the fringe aspects of pop culture with no small amount of nostalgia, wonder and bewilderment. 

Rudy always credits Douglas Imbrogno, at the time the guiding light of The Gazz, with unleashing this blog on the world (and for giving the blog its name). 

Over time the Gazette lost interest in The Gazz. Other Gazzblogs petered out. The Gazz section of the newspaper became just a regular weekend section, and the paper merged with its rival, The Charleston Daily Mail, then went through a bankruptcy and was rescued somewhat by HD Media.  Unfortunately, The Charleston Gazette-Mail is facing the same issues that every print newspaper in the world is up against, and began shedding award-winning reporters and editors, and more importantly, advertisers. 

While The Gazette has graciously played host to PopCult, they never really seemed to be too enthusiastic about it. No efforts were made to monetize it, and the last time the blog was mentioned in print was in 2015 for its tenth anniversary. 

In November, 2020, The Gazette-Mail redesigned their website, and the new design did not have any links with which to navigate to The PopCult Blog. While the author does not assign malice to this action, it was a good motivator for him to back up all his posts for the previous fifteen years and set up an independent website to host the blog. You’re reading that now. 

By 2022, Rudy stopped updating both sites, and within a few months the Gazette version of PopCult disappeared. 

Now completely independent, PopCult includes The AIR, our internet radio station (you can find a player for it on every page), and maintains several regular features: Monday Morning Art presents artwork created by Rudy Panucci in a variety of different media; Radio Free Charleston is both a radio program and a video show, and a new episode of the radio show drops every Tuesday, while the video show is less frequent now; STUFF TO DO is a weekly rundown of events within driving distance of Charleston, WV. While PopCult has an international readership now, this feature is our nod to our roots as a local blog; The PopCulteer runs every Friday, and it can be a long essay, a series of short items, a photo essay, or a video, with a different topic every week; The RFC Flashback, every Saturday, presents classic episodes of the Radio Free Charleston video show, or The RFC MINI SHOW, which were produced almost weekly from 2006 to 2016; Sunday Evening Video is just that, a random, pop culture video, curated for our readers every Sunday. It can be anything from videos produced exclusively for this blog to classic concerts by major musical artists, long-lost movies or TV shows or or just something bizarre we find on the internet. 

In addition to our regular features, we also have recurring review features such as The PopCult ToyBox, The PopCult Bookshelf, The PopCult Comix Bookshelf, The PopCult Cereal Bowl, and on rare occasions, new installments of Animated Discussions, the formerly weekly column on animation, written by Rudy with his wife, Mel Larch, originally for The Charleston Gazette, starting back in 1991.