Here's another precursor to the famous finale of Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, this time from Az 1848-49-iki Magyar Szabadságharcz Története by György Gracza, 1894.  [Previously, and better, here.]

Here's a precursor to the Woman With No Name from David Lynch's delirious farce "On the Air" (1992), from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

The phrase "ghosts of dead toys" delivers just one Google result from 1908.  Our illustration appears fours years earlier, in St. Nicholas magazine, 1904.

Here's a precursor to 1939's "The Teapot Song" (a.k.a. "I'm a Little Teapot"), from The Nightingale by Richard André, 1899.

Fans of Harry Hill's TV Burp series (and only they) will immediately recognize this precursor to the hybrid monster Wagbo.  From The Oxford Thackeray.

Here's our question: If there were Ten Thousand Wonderful Things in 1890, how could there be only 14,000 Things to Be Happy About a hundred years later?  We're gaining only forty new wonderful things per year?  Let's add that sad fact to 11,002 Things to Be Miserable About.

Here's a precursor to the Pez candy dispenser, from Nouveaux Voyages en Zigzag à la Grande Chartreuse by Rodolphe Toepffer, 1854.

Here's a precursor to the 1927 film It, with Clara Bow as the "it girl."  Our illustration is by L. Hurley for The Echo yearbook of Greensboro College, 1921.  (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)

Potatoes from heaven, apparently, and a precursor to this 1949 story of firefighters in the Sierra Nevada Mountains who dumbfoundedly watched as a supply plane dropped a hundred-pound sack of potatoes directly atop a full-sized iron stove that had been carried by mules to the peak.  Our heavenly potatoes illustration appears in Prodigiorvm ac Ostentorvm Chronicon, 1557.

Here's a precursor to the Aerosmith song "Love in an Elevator," from The Dove's Nest and Other Tales, 1886.  The caption reads, "Love in a lift."

Here's a precursor to the internet: "The web of uncertain quality," from Canadian Grocer July-Dec. 1896.