Precursors

Though the famed comedian/juggler/alcoholic W. C. Fields made his Broadway debut in 1906 at the age of 26, we're going to register this 1906 image from London's Punch as a precursor to the archetype that later became his signature.  The caption reads: "Thoughts for non-thinkers.  Be sure you raise no more spirits than you can conjure down."

One hundred and eighteen years before Twitter, the immature gathered out of doors to exchange "five minutes' stories."  (The illustration is from Five Minutes' Stories by Mrs. Molesworth, 1888.)

Eighty-two years before Coldplay proclaimed, "It was all yellow," everything was turning yellow in The Panama Plot by Arthur Benjamin Reeve (1918).

Here's a precursor to the self-referential prose fictions of postmodernism: "The Story of a Story" by Helen W. Pierson, from Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine, 1884.

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).