Here's a precursor to Arrested Development's Tobias wondering what his daughter is thinking.  The subtitle reads, "She lives her life, and I get the pleasure of guessing what that might entail."  The precursor appears in The Lady's Manor by Emma Marshall, 1896.  Its caption reads, "What is my little girl thinking about?"

Here's a precursor to Sluggo's levitating hat, from The Up-to-Date Primer by John Wilson Bengough, 1896.

Here's a precursor to Mount Rushmore, from Walt Mason: His Book, 1916.  The caption reads, "Like some lone mountain in the starry night."

Here's a precursor to Flat Stanley, from Blasts from The Ram's Horn, 1902.

Here's a precursor to Escheresque architecture, from Geschichte Oesterreichs by Alexander Patuzzi, 1862 (thirty-six years before Escher was born).

Here's a precursor to TED Talks.  The caption reads, "The living hand on the screen, shown during the course of a lecture delivered by Henry Morton at the Academy of Music, New York, February 3, 1871."  From Morton Memorial by Franklin De Ronde Furman, 1905.

Here's a precursor to the "great dorg" of a film Mannequin (1987), from The Tinted Venus by J. Bernard Partridge, 1898.  The caption reads, "'It is a miserable thing,' he was thinking, 'for a man to have a female statue trotting after him like a great dorg.'"

Fifty years before Phil Spector invented the "Wall of Sound," there was the sphere of sound, as we see in this illustration from the magazine Crisis, 1910.

♪ ♫  Tale as old as time

Here's a precursor to the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, from an ad in the back of the novel A Woman with a History by Weedon Grossmith (1896).

This precursor to Mary Poppins appears in Fra Det Moderne Frankrig by Richard Kaufmann, 1882.

"Keep on keeping on": We can do a bit better than Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, which traces that phrase back to the 1910s.  Consider Charles Haddon Spurgeon back in 1888: "I spoke about the difficulty of keeping on.  'Yes,' answered my friend, 'and it is harder still to keep on keeping on'" (Spurgeon's Gold: New Selections from the Works of C. H. Spurgeon, p. 30).

Here's a precursor to James and the Giant Peach, from The Child World by Gabriel Setoun, 1896.

Here's a precursor to a Peter Lorre caricature, from The Farm Poultry, 1907.  (Peter would have been just three years old at the time.)

Here's a precursor to 'We are all Santa' and 'Your face here,' from Some Account of Colton and of the De Wasteney's Family by Frederick Perrot Parker (1897).  The caption reads: "St. Nicholas."

Here's a precursor to the space-folding "Holtzman Effect" from Frank Herbert's Dune universe (1965), as seen in Jeanne d'Arc et la Normandie au XVme Siècle by Albert Sarrazin, 1896.

Here's a precursor to the tacky tourist postcard culture of Florida, from Camping and Cruising in Florida by James Alexander Henshall, 1884.