Here's a precursor to trash television.  From Louisville's 1975 yearbook.

The Joe Camel mascot wasn't the first animal to glamorize smoking to children.  From Making Up with Mr. Dog by Albert Bigelow Paine and illustrated by J. M. Paine, 1901.

Here's a precursor to that line in John Waters' Pecker, in which an obscene caller asks for a body part to be put up to the phone.  The caption reads, "Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone."  From Georgia Southern's 1962 yearbook.

Ten years before Candid Camera, there was this Candid Cam.  From Texas Wesleyan's 1938 yearbook.

An ancestor of the band Devo's mascot Booji Boy (the spirit of infantile de-evolution)?  From Oberlin's 1905 yearbook.

Long before John Waters' "Odorama" or Hans Laube's "Smell-O-Vision," books were doing it.  From Fairy Prince by Eleanor Abbott, 1922.

This Elvis looks like a precursor to Jay Leno.  From Nebelspalter, 1958.

A precursor to the fog machine: steam from "the dance kettle."  From The Moon Prince by Richard Kendall Munkittrick, 1893.

Though Dali's pocket watch began melting two decades earlier, the technology of a melting hourglass of course predates the melting of clockwork.  From the University of the South's 1950 yearbook.

Back in 1969, college computer centers were still waiting for Steve Jobs' 1982 initiative to get an Apple computer in every school.  Yes, it's literally a "computerless computer center," from St. Procopius' 1969 yearbook.

A precursor to Smokey Bear.  From Der Bärenspiegel, 1935.

Here's a precursor to Why Cats Paint, only with rabbits.  From Sandman Twilight Stories by Abbie Phillips Walker and illustrated by Rhoda C. Chase, 1918.

Here's a precursor to the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea.  From Coraddi, 1936.

Here's a precursor to How to Believe in Your Elf.  From Sandman Twilight Stories by Abbie Phillips Walker and illustrated by Rhoda C. Chase, 1918.

Here's a precursor to John Blase's logic that God is blue:

If God is Love (as the Bible says)
and Love is Blue (as the song says)
then the law of transitivity leads me to
at least consider the possibility that
God is Blue (as I’ve long hunched).
—"In Praise of Blue," 2020

From The Gateway, Feb. 20, 1969.

From Processed World, 1982 (coincidentally reflected in Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2019).

Here's a precursor to the jealous girlfriend meme.  From Millikin's 1954 yearbook.

Check out the date of publication and see if this book title seems 14 years too early: The Year of Endless Sorrows by Adam Rapp.

Here's a precursor to bars hanging televisions near the ceiling.  From Nebelspalter, 1958.

That blob of people is a precursor to the Brian Yuzna horror film Society (1989).  From Nebelspalter, 1901.