The Feejee Mermaid was a hoax that fooled 19th-century America. In 1842 showman P.T. Barnum displayed in New York a withered creature billed as a mermaid caught near the Fiji Islands, with a monkey-like upper half joined to a fish tail. It was actually a type of folk art made in Japan and the East Indies, where such fish-and-monkey hybrids were sold as charms and linked to the ningyo, a mermaid-like yokai that could curse or grant long life. A sailor bought one, and Boston museum owner Moses Kimball sold the idea to Barnum, who planted newspaper letters from a fake expert before exhibiting it. Some viewers took it as a missing link between sea and land life, and it fuelled debate about evolution.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.