A precursor to Barbara Streisand from The Lady's Realm (1900).  The caption reads: "'Down on your bended knees, then, and adore me,' said Babs."

A precursor to the Death Star's approach to Alderaan? From The Deer Smellers of Haunted Mountain by John J. Meyer (1921).  The caption reads: "Approaching the perfect world."

A precursor to the poster for the Finnish film Sisko Tahtoisin Jäädä (2010) is, of course, Twin Peaks.

A precursor to the gingerbread house: Scone Palace. From Scotland Picturesque and Traditional by George Eyre Todd (1895).

"The original blighted being": an illustration from an 1855 issue of Punch magazine.

Here's a precursor to episode 29 of Twin Peaks, in which Agent Cooper's cup of the coffee in the Otherworld turns out to be viscid.  In a scene cut from Olsen & Johnson's Crazy House, "They find [Hans Conried] reclining on a divan, sniffing a rose, and painting blindfolded.  Roco explains that he is endeavoring to paint the scent of the rose—its very essence.  Another scene has Roco offering the boys a cup of coffee, then pulling it out of a painting on the wall depicting the same.  To their disgust, the liquid turns out to be paint.  An unfazed Roco says, 'I'm an artist, not a magician!'" (Hans Conried: A Biography by Suzanne Gargiulo).

Here's a precursor to how "some states inflate their books to make themselves look better" (Democracy and Leadership by Eric Thomas Weber, 2013), from Western Wilds and the Men Who Redeem Them by John Hanson Beadle, 1878.

Before the cursed videotape that caused viewers to die seven days after watching it (in Hideo Nakata's Ring), it was a mere photograph that proved deadly (In the Forbidden Land by Arnold Henry Savage Landor, 1898).  Please view the image at your discretion.

Here's a precursor to Disneyland's submarine lagoon.  The Disney version appears to have been inspired by the Grande Cascade Waterfall at Bois de Bologne, Paris, created by Baron Haussmann in 1852.  Our illustration appears in Fra Det Moderne Frankrig by Richard Kaufmann, 1882.

"I would that this dear path might type my way" (1870): a precursor to Charles Dizenzo:

"Imagine if I had an electric at my command: I could type my way around the world at jet speed!" (A Great Career: A One-Act Play, 1966).

A friend made a graph comparing how much folks talk nonstop about bacon to the number of damns the rest of us give about how much any of them like bacon.  He noted, "What really makes the bacon thing (and other such things) annoying to me is that by the time they attain 'thing' status, they no longer seem to be about loving whatever it is—it seems to be more of a fetishization and status marker (i.e., the status of someone duly participating in whatever the zeitgeist has determined his/her demographic should participate in). You and I love cheese because, well, we really love cheese—not because the concept of 'cheese' has become a totem or a meme!"

Flirting with bacon as a status marker goes back at least to the mid-1800s, as we see in this illustration from The Oxford Thackeray.

Here's a precursor to The Village People, from (what else?) Bachelor Ballads by Harry A. Spurr, 1899.

Here's a precursor to the quotation craze — an author of "bits of books" from The Man in the Moon, 1847.

Here's a precursor to Prof. Henry Higgins and flower girl Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion (1912), from an advertisement in A Lawful Crime by Edward Kent, 1899.  The illustration is by Phil May.

A precursor to 1958's hula hoop, from a 1900 issue of The Lady's Realm.

Here's what we might call a precursoral opposite.  In The Shining (1980), countless variations of the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" cover hundreds of typewritten pages, revealing that Jack Torrance is disturbed.  In a 1908 issue of The Windsor Magazine, the blankness of a page reveals that someone is disturbed.

The caption reads, "'You have been disturbed!' she cried sorrowfully, as she took in the blankness of the page."

Hundreds of years before the phenomenon of walking while texting, folks were glued to windows, insensible to the wonders around them.  We find proof in Arthur's Home Magazine, 1876.  The caption reads: "She stood leaning against a window, but not seeing the beauty that lay stretched before her."

Here's a precursor to comedian Steve Martin's arrow-through-the-head gag, from Bachelor Ballads and Other Lazy Lyrics by Harry A. Spurr and illustrated by J. Hassall (1899).  However, we understand that the gag technically traces back to the play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), with this stage direction: "Enter Rafe, with a forked arrow through his head."