Here's a precursor to Disneyland's continuous loop of "It's a Small World After All": "The world is getting smaller all the time."  From The Children's Newspaper, 1950.

Here's a precursor to Xavier: Renegade Angel episode 9, "Signs from Godrilla" (2007): an interpreter says, "Now she's being very eloquent, saying some very touching things.  She's being moving."  From the University of Wisconsin's 1931 yearbook.

Forty years before The Partridge Family (1970 sitcom) there was *a* partridge family in Elson-Gray Basic Readers Book Four, 1931.

A year before How to Live Like Your Cat, there was our own How to Be Your Own Cat.

Here's a precursor to the film Dark City.  From McGill Universty's 1926 yearbook.

Here's a precursor to Mickey Mouse, from 3 years before the debut of the more famous iteration.  From Children's Paper, 1925.

Here's a sentence diagram that's a precursor to Lars Von Trier's Kingdom series.  From Grammar for Composition by C. H. Ward, 1933.

Here's a precursor to the sandworms of Frank Herbert's Dune.  From Number Stories Book 2 by Studebaker, Findley, Knight & Gray, 1942.

Here's a precursor to the "Find My" apps.  The talking collar-button, from Life Magazine, 1921.  [ViaJonathan Caws-Elwitt]

Here's a precursor to the film Dark City (1998).  It's Instant Cities by Gunther Paul Barth, 1988.

A quarter century before Dali's melting watch in "Persistence of Memory," there was this melting clock tower in The Book of Spice by "Ginger" a.k.a. Wallace Irwin, 1906.

Perhaps Van Engen's "seeing through mathematics" (1964) is a precursor to the transparent math proofs defined by Babai, Fortnow, Levin & Szegedy (1991).

Here's a possible ancestor of Alfred E. Neuman, named Stackman.  From Amherst College's 1896 yearbook.

Here's a precursor to Henny Youngman's paraprosdokian "Take my wife, please!"  It's "Here, fellow, will you have a wife?"  From Stories of Early England by Ethel Mary Wilmot-Buxton, 1907.

Here's a precursor to Twin Peaks' fish in the percolator.  From Think-and-Do Book to Accompany Streets and Roads by Gray & Monroe, 1940.

Five years before Uncle Fester lit light bulbs in his mouth in The Addams Family series (1964), we saw it done in Broome Technical Community College's 1959 yearbook.

A precursor to Gomez Addams.  From Purple Parrot, 1932.

Two Twin Peaks precursors on the same page -- a vision of an old, tall, gaunt man (as character Dale Cooper had) and a reference to The Great Northern.  From the Duluth Herald, 1900.

Why do kangaroos paint?  Why paint kangaroos?  It's a precursor to Why Cats Paint and Why Paint Cats.  From Barnard College's 1903 yearbook.

A precursor to Disneyland's Storybookland canal ride past little villages.  From The Voyage of the Wishbone Boat by Alice C. D. Riley, 1906.