IRVINGTON, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 16, 1998 – "There wasn’t enough hard-hitting writing about Eight is Enough, Barry Manilow, and Ozzy Osbourne on the net. We had to do something about it," says Ape Culture co-editor Julie Wiskirchen, when asked about the impetus of the pop culture webzine.

Ape Culture is the co-creation of Wiskirchen and Mary Elizabeth Ladd who met while studying in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. Secretaries by day, writers by night, Ladd and Wiskirchen digest pop culture so you don’t have to. "We take that long, hard look at pop culture after the buzz has died down and we examine what remains of our psyche," Ladd says.

Debuting in April, 1998, Ape Culture has received various awards, named one of the best web sites of 1999 by Web Guide Magazine and was listed in Yahoo! Internet Life Magazines June 2002 issue about Humor on the Net .  "I’m ape for Ape Culture," says Spike, of "The Spike Report" in The Online Journalism Review.

About Ape Culture

Ape Culture is one of the few pop culture zines that makes celebrity consumerism personal. One of the first online pop culture zines to showcase a variety of personal responses to celebrity culture, Ape Culture launched in April 1998 with essays, reviews, critiques, satires, parodies and poems. Ape Culture focuses personal attention on the major areas of popular culture: television, movies, and music. In addition to entertainment reviews and features, the webzine offers poetry, travel and holiday guides, advice columns, media morphing, and a celebrity biography hypertext game. 

Ape Culture is not a one-trick pony of satires and parodies. We try to go deeper by exploring how pop culture and celebrity obsession affect individual people. Ape Culture believes we are not just the dumb spectators most culture critics believe us to be; nor are we the dumb purchasers most pop traffickers think we are either. We are not inanimate, unthinking, nonjudgmental, uncritical passives. And yet, we are not immune to the damages of modern popular culture. It’s easy to get stuck in the quagmire of taste, competition and just plain old fun.

By placing a magnifying glass on celebrity obsession, Ape Culture often mocks its movers, shakers and consumers alike and is both critical and self-critical. The emissaries of Ape Culture will gladly walk the halls of this culture asylum so you don’t have to. In fact, they can't stay away. They have their own celebrity obsessions to tend.

Ape Culture has been called "one of the funniest sites online" by Prodigy Comedy Community E-Zines and was voted one of the best web sites of 1999 by Web Guide Magazine, who claimed "This e-zine attempts to make a monkey out of American pop culture --   or does it insinuate pop culture is making a monkey out of you?"