A precursor to the cult television series The Prisoner:  "Are you the gentleman who occupies Number Six"? From The Saturday Evening Post, 5 November 1904.

A precursor to the cult television series The Prisoner: Even as a baby, he would not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. (This illustration, by William Donahey, is from The Green Book magazine, 1916.)  The caption reads, "Number? Number, please?"

Before the walrus was Paul, the walrus was Lewis Carroll.  (Thanks, JohnnyDiego!)

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings."

A Yorkshire girl named Diot Coke was born in the year 1379.  Futility Closet spills the details.

A precursor to the cult television series The Prisoner episode "Arrival" from Metropolitan Magazine, 1905. The caption reads, "The light flooded the apartment. It was almost a replica of my own studio."

"Hiding the babies": a precursor to the Easter egg hunt?  From A Pair of Originals by Evelyn Everett-Green (1891).

Here's a precursor to a Hitler imitation:  an illustration from an 1892 issue of The Idler magazine.

Twenty years before George Vernon Hudson proposed daylight saving time, Father Time advanced the clock in Father Time's Story Book by Kathleen Knox (1873).

W. S. Gilbert's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1874) precedes Tom Stoppard's by 92 years.  (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Pictured left, the first page of Gilbert's play.  Right, a poster for the 1991 film of Stoppard's play.

Here's a precursor to Ronette Pulaski of Twin Peaks.  (Fans of the series will recognize the scene in question.)  The illustration appears about a century earlier, in Henley I. Arden's Elizabeth or Cloud and Sunshine (1891).

"Lamia":  an illustration from a 1900 issue of The Idler magazine and a precursor to the spooky portraits hanging in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

Before Andy Warhol made his famous pronouncement, the polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (b. 1742) noted, "Everyone is a genius at least once a year."  (Lichtenberg added that "real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.")

Before Arrested Development introduced us to the fictional self-help book The Man Inside Me (2004), there was The Man Inside (1914).

"For there's a man inside me, and only when he's finally out, can I walk free of pain." —Dr. Tobias Fünke

Recreation of The Man Inside Me cover by VIsraWratS.

Here's a precursor to filmmaker John Waters "jumping the shark."

By the time audiences and auteurs settled into the ’80s, America’s look back in affection at the ’50s had begun to show its age. (When Fonzie jumped the shark in an episode of "Happy Days,” his daredevil stunt soon became shorthand for that precise moment in time when a beloved piece of pop culture begins to overstay its welcome). That didn’t stop "Pope of Trash” John Waters from mining the world of downscale greasers for 1990’s "Cry-Baby.” —Scott Stiffler

Our precursor appears in Frederick Upham Adams' The Kidnapped Millionaires: A Tale of Wall Street and the Tropics (1901).

One hundred and thirty-four years before C. S. Lewis published a demonic exchange in The Screwtape Letters, we were invited to listen in on an Infernal Conference or, Dialogues of Devils (1808).

Forty-four years before Doctor Dolittle talked to the animals, we learned that animals say such things as:

• He did it first.
• I wish.
• I don't care.
• Not my fault.
• What is that to you?
• I am as good as you.
• More, more.
• Why not?

Additionally:

(The Man's Boot and Other Tales; or Fabulous Truths in Words of One Syllable by Gertrude Sellon, 1876.)

Forty-four years before children found a doorway to a magical world within a cabinet (C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950), children found a doorway to a magical world within a cupboard (Mrs. Molesworth's The Bolted Door, 1906).

Though the famed comedian/juggler/alcoholic W. C. Fields made his Broadway debut in 1906 at the age of 26, we're going to register this 1906 image from London's Punch as a precursor to the archetype that later became his signature.  The caption reads: "Thoughts for non-thinkers.  Be sure you raise no more spirits than you can conjure down."

One hundred and eighteen years before Twitter, the immature gathered out of doors to exchange "five minutes' stories."  (The illustration is from Five Minutes' Stories by Mrs. Molesworth, 1888.)

Eighty-two years before Coldplay proclaimed, "It was all yellow," everything was turning yellow in The Panama Plot by Arthur Benjamin Reeve (1918).

The caption reads: "Suddenly there was the sharp cry of a woman. 'Yellow—everything is turning yellow!'"