Eighty-four years before Tim Burton introduced Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas, L. Frank Baum's The Road to Oz featured another pumpkin-head named Jack.

This precursor to the great Charles Fort (complete with a shower of frogs) appears in Punch, 1867.

Here's the opening piano solo from the film The Exorcist (1973) being played back in 1877 (London Society magazine).  Totally tubular!

A century before our minimalist coloring book, Alphonse Allais painted a white rectangle entitled First Communion of Anemic Young Girls in a Snowstorm.

(Thanks, Futility Closet.)

We discovered this precursor to Terry Gilliam's dystopian satire Brazil in Punch, 1872.  Those are encroaching ducts, don't you know.

Over a century before Motown "heard it through the grapevine," climbing and trailing plants of the vine family actually kept secrets instead of spreading them.  The caption of this illustration makes it all clear: "Dear ivy, keep my secret safe; / Like him, you cannot guess / That life and love are centered here, / Where I have written—Yes!" (London Society, 1877).

134 years before the fad of collecting Facebook "friends," ladies wore their followers in fashionable lockets.  From London Society, 1870.

"'THIS is the BEETLE, with her thread and needle' suggests a kind of domesticated Gregor Samsa, but it well precedes Kafka."

Thanks to Encyclopedia Virgina for this precursor by Richard Wynn Keene (a.k.a. Dykwynkyn) for a Cock Robin pantomime character, c. 1860.

Here's a precursor to the spooky wallpaper in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, from a 1904 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.  This illustration prefigures the work of M.C. Escher by about three decades.

Did you know the "sexy nun" costume goes back at least to 1879?  From Punch.

A precursor to the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith, from Punch, 1851.

Today, we might liken an experience to "something out of a movie."  But back in 1872, things were different. "'Why this is like a book, isn't it?' said she" (Century Illustrated).

Here's a precursor to David Lynch's comic strip "The Angriest Dog in the World," about a dog "so angry he cannot move; he cannot eat; he cannot sleep; he can just barely growl; bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis."  This vintage angriest dog appears in Puck, 1886.

Over a century before they called Shaggy "Mr. Boombastic," General Boombastes commanded the dancehall.  From Punch, 1892.

Five years before the birth of the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, an elephant man appeared in Punch (1857).

Here's a precursor to the song "Me and Mrs. Jones," who had a thing goin' on all the way back in 1857.  (Punch)

The "Cone of Silence," made famous in the Get Smart comedy series, first appeared over a century earlier, in Punch, 1857.

[For Jonathan.]