Abecedarian : Precursors

Precursors

February 6, 2014

Here's a precursor to the twelve British meals as depicted in the hilarious series Look Around You (2002). Below are the twelve meals, followed by an account from Frank Sullivan's In One Ear (1933), including the succession of "bites" called tiffin, miffin, hiffin, and giffin.

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February 5, 2014

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Jonathan Caws-Elwitt shares a precursor from "A Trip to Hollywood," by Frank Sullivan. Cf. Python's famous "I'd like to have an argument, please" sketch.

"I am here to see the sights, and I have read so much in the papers about the famous arguments that you and Mrs. Weissmuller have, that I was hoping to see one before I left."
"I'll see if I can fix it," Mr. Weissmuller said pleasantly. . . . "Lupe! Lupe!"
[...]
"What you want now, John-ee?" she exploded. "Always you call, 'Lupe, Lupe, Lupe.' Why do you not leave me alone?"
"This gentleman wanted to see you and me have a little spat."
"I am beezy sweeming," stormed Miss Velez. "I have no time to spat wiz you."

January 30, 2014

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Jonathan Caws-Elwitt shares a precursor to Victor Borge. According to H. Allen Smith, Vladimir de Pachmann would call for a book to elevate himself on a piano stool that was supposedly too low, then pretend he was now too high, and then remove one page to get the height just right.

January 29, 2014

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We learn in the BBC series The Mighty Boosh that "there are over seventeen mirrors in the mirror world." We find a precursor in The Century of Louis XIV by Frances Cashel Hoey, 1896.

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The mirror world from The Mighty Boosh.

#vintage illustration #fashion #vintage fashion #mirror world #illustration #mighty boosh

A precursor to the Death By Lemon cake recipe. An illustration from an 1879 issue of Punch magazine.

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#death #vintage #poison #lemon #sickle

January 23, 2014

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Here's a precursor to fans of Seal (Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel), from seventy years before the singer-songwriter's birthday.

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Above, "Watching for seal," from In Arctic Seas by Robert Neff Keely, 1893.

Below, watching for Seal.

#fishing #eskimo

January 22, 2014

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The first "you mama such a dog" joke appears in Ghost Stories (1865). The caption reads: "There is the nocturnal visitor whom you have so long taken for the ghost of your mother."

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#vintage illustration #ghost #illustration

January 18, 2014

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Here's a precursor to Gary Larson: an illustration from a 1918 issue of Life magazine. The caption reads: "Fra Ignatius has a God-given gift for caricature."

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#vintage illustration #torture #dungeon #caricature #illustration #inquisition #1910s

January 9, 2014

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Here's a precursor to Merrell's line of "angelic shoes," from Kulturgeschichte by Friedrich Anton Heller von Hellwald, 1896.

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#vintage illustration #angels #cherub #illustration #shoes #shoemaker

January 7, 2014

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Here's a precursor to MGM's Cowardly Lion of Oz, from Le Grand Siècle by Émile Bourgeois, 1896.

#vintage illustration #wizard of oz #cat people #oz #illustration #cowardly lion #lion man

December 30, 2013

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Here's a precursor to the Orwellian NSA's rampant violations of civil liberties, from The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1893.

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#vintage illustration #spying #illustration #orwellian #civil liberties

December 27, 2013

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Here's a precursor to tablets and smart phones destroying human communication, from Humorous Poems by Alfred Ainger, 1893. The caption says, "Reading,—and wept."

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#vintage illustration #illustration #read it and weep

December 23, 2013

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Here's a precursor to the classic The Lion in Winter, in which Eleanor of Aquitaine says, on Christmas day, "Of course he has a knife; he always has a knife; we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!" This will also be of interest: The Collected Lost Meanings of Christmas.

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"One Christmas," from Pleasant Hours, 1888.

#vintage illustration #christmas #knives #illustration #lion in winter

December 18, 2013

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This precursor to the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of Fantasia appears in an 1885 edition of Goethe's Italian Journey.

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#vintage illustration #thumbing nose #goethe #illustration #sorcerer's apprentice

November 12, 2013

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Nearly seventy years before Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, we find "Death on the rail" in Mrs. Grundy, 1865.

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#vintage illustration #death #skeleton #grim reaper #locomotive #train wreck #illustration

November 6, 2013

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Orson Welles' Lady from Shanghai famously features a shootout in a hall of mirrors. A 1901 issue of Puck shows a gunslinger using his looking-glass reflections as decoys.

Our own adventure in a cracked hall of mirrors is captured on video.

#vintage illustration #orson welles #illustration #mirrors #hall of mirrors #lady from shanghai

October 17, 2013

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"Wouldn't it be loverly" to have a room somewhere "with one enormous chair"? That's what Eliza dreamed of in My Fair Lady (1956), though rooms with enormous chairs go back at least as far as 1865, as we see in Punch:

#vintage illustration #chair #illustration #enormous chair

October 16, 2013

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Before "snail mail" there was "butterfly mail," as we see in the sixth season of Bewitched.

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#butterfly #bewitched #elizabeth montgomery

October 10, 2013

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Thirty-three years before Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries," in which he likened a far-off train to a crawling caterpillar, this caterpillar train appeared in Punch (1865).

#vintage illustration #caterpillar #steam train #illustration #chekhov

October 4, 2013

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"Everywhere, all the time, a barrage of scrambled images assaults us -- disjointed scenes, outlandish mergers. ... But by now we have little trouble reading or understanding this new visual lingo. ... We have already had our homework done for us by Picasso." —Life, "The Power of Picasso," Dec. 27 1968

One hundred years earlier, a proto-Picasso debuted in Punch (1860).

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#vintage illustration #illustration #picasso

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