Originally Posted by KaiYeves

You know something I've been wondering about? What was the first appearance of the whole "in museums, after dark, stuff comes to life" thing? The movie was based on a 1993 book, and the author says he thought up the idea independently, but I found the premise in a book about the Smithsonian from the seventies. And there's a Norman Rockwell painting from the 1950s where a night guard is eating a sandwich in a museum under a statue of a horse, and it sort of looks like the horse is looking down at him.