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There is something creepy about people in jars.
So just like most everything else people find creepy for various reasons, writers like putting people in jars. Experimentation, containment, study, incubation, medical reasons or just plain old sucking out their Life Force. Some writers just love putting people in jars, and especially love comparing them to insects or pickled specimens.
If these are being used to make better soldiers, it's often easy to tell when they're at full power, as it's quite common for the specimen to break out and start killing everyone.
Oh, call them pods, tanks, containment units or chambers all you like. These are people in jars.
Compare Brain In A Jar and Soul Jar.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The dead body of Fate Testarossa's older sister Alicia or better said, the girl Fate was cloned from is kept in a jar. Also, in StrikerS, there are scores of said girls in Scaglietti's lair, which are revealed to be his illegally-created minions, and some broken People Jars in his abandoned labs; this has something to do with the forbidden research of the first season, as well as its presumed-dead Big Bad.
- Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch; Noel and Coco are imprisoned in underwater fish tanks. Gackto also wants to trap the girls in this.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion with mindless clones of Rei grown as substitute Eva pilots, first encountered in one of the most Squick-inducing scenes in the entire series.
- It's implied that there is a similar tank full of Kaworu clones, as Units 05-13 use Kaworu-powered dummy plugs.
- In Wolf's Rain, Cheza was in a jar being studied by Cher Degre before she got busted out by Darcia. In this case, she's not being imprisoned — just studied and kept alive. The second time she gets put in a jar, it follows the trope much more closely because 1) she's been forcibly taken, 2) her most zealous bodyguard Kiba has also been locked in a nearby jar and is having his blood drained out, and 3) Jagara and her guests are drinking WOLF BLOOD in front of her, which may or may not be Kiba's. Did I mention that spilled wolf's blood in general triggers Cheza's scream reflex?
- Former Big Bad Lord Genome from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is revived as a "biological computer" after the Time Skip, which means he's now living life as a Futurama-style head in a jar. This was also his Heel Face Turn, as he started relaying truth and Techno Babble about the Anti-Spirals and the series' backstory. In the very end, Genome does get his body back, and goes out in a blaze of glory.
- In a flashback in Chrono Crusade, Rosette tries to scare her brother Joshua away from joining the order by warning him that they'll conduct experiments on him, and he's "gonna end up pickled in formaldehyde!" The anime shows a scene in her imagination of Joshua floating naked in a jar while a Mad Scientist looks on with a creepy grin. There was also the other five Apostles that the Sinners kept in jars, and the clone of Azmaria's foster father's wife.
- Several characters in Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny were grown in jars. They all have issues.
- In the Tales Of Symphonia OVA, the Asgard ranch had these.
- Lord Renard from Scrapped Princess planned to used followers from the Browning Church to power a Wave Motion Gun to annihilate the city of St. Grendel, home to the Church of Mauser. He himself is actually a Mauser inquisitor, and promptly leaves them all for dead when he finds out that Pacifica and her party are in the area.
- Katekyo Hitman Reborn! has Mukuro chained in a jar after certain plot points.
- After being cut in half, Yu Yu Hakusho's Hiei is put in a tank to heal.
- In Elementalors, Asami is put in a tank as a form of being Brainwashed.
- The Outlaw Star's Spaceship Girl, Melfina, climbs into a tank naked to provide special navigation.
- The Fullmetal Alchemist anime has the chimera clone of Tucker's dead daughter Nina.
- Guyver: Plenty of unfinished Zoanoids hanging out in jars... and one of the few instances where you actually see someone leaving one of the jars without someone having to smash said jar first.
- In the Shinjuku arc of G Gundam, after snapping from some odd Mind Control Rain finds herself in a lair containing several people in jars like this, who happen to be the crewmates of other Gundam Fighters (Chibidee's Four Girl Ensemble, Argo's jailer Natasha, Sai Saici's tutors Keiun and Zuisen, and George's Battle Butler Raymond). She has to free them from their collective Convenient Coma before they're forcefully infected with the DG Cells.
- Later, an injured Allenby Biarzury is briefly kept in a "jar" before she's brainwashed into fighting Domon and Rain in the Rantao Island Battle Royale
- In Turn A Gundam, several Moonrace people are kept in jars and in suspended animation. IIRC, two of them are Queen Diana and Teteth Halleh's mother Linda
- In Ergo Proxy, it turns out that the humans who survived the ecological collapse were modified humans left behind and grown from the cells of "proxies," creatures at the heart of each city, meaning everyone probably started this way. The proxies themselves, or at least the one from Romdeau, were kept in people jars as well.
- Ryoko ends up put in one of these via Big Bad Kagato in the Tenchi Muyo OAV. Washu had been in hers for quite a while, too.
- In Naruto, Orochimaru's bases often have people in jars in them as experiments. A more recent one is Suigetsu, who is released by Sasuke to join him.
Comic Books
- The all-too-brief "Stealing Thunder" arc of Justice Society Of America had the entire metahuman community put in jars, with a few exceptions—mostly escapees and specific heroes that he needed for his own purposes. This was achieved by taking over the mind of Johnny Thunder and recalling the Thunderbolt genie from Jakeem Thunder.
- The Far Side had quite a few of the "humans are bugs" variety. One involved an alien lab tech getting scolded by his mentor for putting "two incompatible species in the Earth Terrarium", panning to a tiny human in a terrarium getting mauled by a tiny bear. Another one has one giant alien reminding the other to poke holes in the jar to avoid an obvious Noodle Incident.
- Then there was the incidents with the Hatfields and McCoys being put in the same jar, and On The Sixth Day, when God was adding Humans to his recipe for Earth, Jerks in a spice jar.
- And the one where a boy liberates a genie and uses his first two wishes to put his parents in jars. The third wish is just the icing on the cake.
- In Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm, the hollow mountain under Hunte Castle is full of grotesque homunculi in jars, left behind by Those Wacky Nazis and their experiments.
Films
- Star Wars: In a less squicky moment, Luke Skywalker recovers from ice monster injuries and near hypothermia in a bacta tank.
- The Expanded Universe and prequels had clones in jars. On Kamino, the cloned fetuses are grown in pods filled with nutrients. Pretty damn creepy, but even worse is the part about the clones' training. "If clones showed any signs of abnormality, they often mysteriously disappeared in the late hours of night. This was the case of a batch of young clones whose vision was not 1oo% perfect".
- Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite could be seen as a variation of the trope.
- Similarly, The Movie Of The Book Starship Troopers puts the protagonist into a jar while a surgical robot fixes a large gash in his leg.
- The Wolverine film had this. Colonel Stryker collected mutants in glass tanks, where they stayed naked in suspended animation and covered in white powder. Stryker's own son was one of these.
- Alien Resurrection: Various Ripley clones, in jars. Since the Ripleys in question are the least successful of a batch of alien hybrids, this is stretching the definition of "people" quite a bit.
- Used beneficially in Hellboy, where Abe is placed in a water-filled glass tube to recuperate after being injured by Samael. Due to his fishy nature it was probably more comfortable and useful than putting him on a hospital bed—although it's not clear how he was supposed to get out again.
- The Matrix: Humans are kept in jars and used as batteries for the machines.
- Blade 3 featured a warehouse, one of many, where brain dead people were kept in storage within what at best described as giant, airtight ziplock bag for backup food supply.
- The Spacing Guild navigators in Dune were essentially mutated ex-humans in jars.
- Spoilerific movie example: The Prestige ends with the revelation that the main character has been cloning himself with Tesla's machine each night, before arranging for the original to die in the water-tanks stored below the stage.
- In the 1976 book and 1978 movie Coma, Robin Cook managed to come up with something even creepier than people in jars: rooms full of people in artificially-induced comas, suspended from the ceiling by wires to keep them from developing bedsores, used as raw material for organ transplants.
- In Parts: The Clonus Horror, clones are stuffed into giant plastic bags before being shipped to America.
- Not jars precisely, but those convicted of "future murders" in Minority Report are kept in an artificially induced coma in a warehouse-like facility.
- Not to mention the precogs themselves, who float/are submerged in a pool of pale liquid...
- The Perfume movie shows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille dipping a woman in a vat full of molten grease in a failed effort to extract her scent.
- The pickled fetuses with the titular deformity in The Devil's Backbone. Oddly, the doctor who keeps these curiosities is a good guy.
- There's a bizarrely funny scene in Bride of Frankenstein where Dr. Praetorius shows off his work in creating life— little people (and a mermaid— "an experiment with seaweed"— in jars. In an FX shot that's damned impressive for 1935, when one of them climbs out of his jar Praetorius picks him up with tweezers and puts him back where he belongs.
- In Unrest, a large tank of formaldehyde is used to hold an autopsy lab's cadavers between med students' dissection exercises. This being a horror movie, some living people get dunked, too.
- Messing with Dead People Jars started the whole brain-eating incident in Return of the Living Dead, when two employees of a medical-supply company carelessly rupture a zombie's containment tank.
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who had infected patients in tanks.
- And don't forget the Face of Boe.
- Dark Angel: Max spent some time in a jar.
- Tank people have shown up in Star Trek The Next Generation and in Star Trek Voyager. In the first, Data found a cryogenic pod containing three frozen American humans from the early 21st century; in the latter, the ship found pods containing people kidnapped from Earth in 1937. One was Amelia Earhardt.
- At the end of Power Rangers Dino Thunder's team-up with the Ninja Rangers, Mesogog, the current Big Bad, somehow reduces Lothor (the previous model) to a miniature figure in a jar, which he describes as "Highly collectible", referencing the show's Merchandise Driven nature.
- Lindsey's Heel Face Turn in Angel is caused by the discovery of people in jars for organ harvesting.
- The Visitor ships in V store thousands of encased humans in suspended animation so they can shipped to the aliens' home planet as food.
- Space Above And Beyond featured a number of scenes (mostly flashbacks) of InVitros in the tanks they were "bred" and devloped to physical maturity in.
- On Babylon 5, Lyta Alexander revealed that the Vorlons kidnapped humans, turned them into telepaths and then grew them in jars.
- Kyle XY spends the first 16 years of his life in one of these, powering some clandestine organization's supercomputer. He hijacked their computer system after realizing that they were using his brain for war purposes and wiped out all their data. He was supposed to be disposed of, but a defector turned him loose instead. That's about where the series starts up.
Toys
- Transformers: Kiss Play: EDC Kiss Players who have failed are apparently stuffed into tubes somewhere below the base. Probably all of them were stripped naked first; Kiss Player Xiao Xiao, after being replaced by the robot-resenting shut-in and generally pathetic Atari Hitotonari, woke in one such tube. When she looked around, the surrounding tubes contained partially eaten remains of other young women. Partially eaten, you ask? Yes, by the phallic-tongued evil robots called Legion. One such was in Xiao Xiao's tube and ready to chow down. That's right — the "good guys" discarded their unwanted to the basement to be eaten alive. No wonder she jumped ship.
- Aquapets. Google it, the Dora the Explorer one is NSFW for reasons other than this trope.
Video Games
Web Animation
- From Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "your funeral
 ", Strong Bad proposes keeping his own body preserved in a jar, "fetal-pig-style", so there will be something to resurrect during the Zombie Apocalypse.
- Invader Zim kept a number of abducted human children in jars for his various experiments. One of whom had the reoccuring gag that, because Zim had operated on the pleasure center of his brain, was completely happy. All the time.
Web Comics
- In the Girl Genius Steam Punk comics, Dr. Beetle, the ruler of Beetleburg, had criminals (even common thieves) sentenced to death and punished by putting them into giant glass jars. They were put up in the town square for all to see while the people inside slowly perished (presumably from heatstroke or lack of water and air). On the whole, the town population approved of his methods.
- This page of Inhuman is a great illustration of People Jars.
- How have you all forgotten about Narbonic? The final arc has a group of hamsters plotting to capture the world's geniuses and most creative minds and trap them in jars to power a device intended to wipe out the rest of humanity. Well, actually the rest of all sentient life on Earth. They haven't yet figured out how to fix that problem.
- In Terinu the Ferin were placed in "Power Cells" up to ten at a time to act as living fusion reactors for the Dominion. they seem to have regarded it as pleasurable though Teri would disagree.
Web Original
- In the story "The Op" of the Whateley Universe, the heroes launch a scout mission into the destroyed city, to find rooms full of horribly organic people pods. Full of women impregnated by the alien horror that has devastated the city. Things go downhill from there.
Western Animation
- Batman The Animated Series: Victor Fries aka Mr Freeze kept his Ill Girl wife, Nora, frozen in a jar until he can find a cure for her Soap Opera Disease. His Batman and Robin incarnation does the same thing.
- The reserve clones of Dean and Hank Venture preserved in glass jars within the Venture compound in The Venture Bros, which was naturally played for comedic laughs (using the banana peel gag on a "liberated" clone).
- The movie Hulk Vs Wolverine features the Weapon X program cloning babies in jars. Deadpool is creeped out by them, and idly mentions wanting to kill them when they're done.
- In an episode of the Dilbert TV series, Dogbert explains that computers are going to take over the world, but fortunately, he has found a way to save humanity. After Dilbert compliments him, Dogbert clarifies that it's in the same way you might save postage stamps, and opens a closet door showing the jars he's saving people in.
- Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are put into these in a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons.
- The DCAU movie Superman: Doomsday, reveals that Luthor has been cloning his own army of Supermen. Lois and Jimmy discover rows upon rows of tubes with clones in various states of development, from zygotes to full-grown men. They're understandably freaked out, and even more freaked out when the prototype clone slices through them with his heat vision.
- An episode of Teen Titans has all the heroes but Robin frozen in jars after they're captured by the Villain Of The Week.
- In Exo Squad, Neosapiens are created in "birthing tubes".
Literature
- In The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods novels by John Christopher), the narrator wonders why no women are seen in the Tripod city. Then his Master takes him to a place were human females are kept preserved like butterflies.
- Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. While investigating the crashed Pass Christian saucer, the heroes discover giant tanks containing living human beings in suspended animation (but not frozen).
- Anne McCaffrey, in The Ship Who Sang and related books has "shell people", who are placed in containers as infants and essentially become cyborgs, many becoming spaceships (one book has a shell person as a sentient city). In fairness, this is only done with infants with severe birth defects and does give a much better quality of life than said birth defects would normally allow the child to have.
- There is one -one- case of a girl about the age of ten (If I remember correctly) going through the process of her own free will. She does fine and eventually buys a company and makes them build her a robotic body she can use, but only within her ship. And it sounds like they're working on giving her more range.
- Even in this case, she only signs up after being rendered quadriplegic by some alien disease.
- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World had the human race conditioning each member of the species by birthing them in jars. Some jars were induced with alcohol and others violently shaken so as to cause the embryo to experience arrested development — so as to make the individual more suitable to the mundane task to which it had been predestined.
- In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, human clones were grown in "Spaarti cylinders", which were more or less People Jars. It was generally accepted that it took three to five years or a year at the very most to grow a trained, battle-ready clone whose life sucked immeasurably; any less than than a year and the clone tended to be unstable and develop Clone Madness, though if a ysalamiri was nearby the process could be shortened to about thirty days. In the Hand Of Thrawn duology Luke and Mara find a clone of Thrawn floating in a cylinder under a base. After Attack Of The Clones came out, things were retconned a little - the Republic and the early Empire used Kaminoan-style clones which needed about ten years of raising, and as time wore on they were replaced by quicker-growing Spaarti clones and, eventually, normal recruits.
- In Glenn Kleier's The Last Day, the Negev laboratory keeps its augmented human prototype (and the control copy) suspended in a clear glass tube, while innumerable tubes and cables enter from above to attach to her skull (to feed her information) and abdomen (to feed her.) The control copy is only attached to feeding tube, with no augmentations. Neither unit had ever existed outside the tube until the meteor hit...
- Sylvia Plath used this trope metaphorically in The Bell Jar to describe alienation.
- Used and subverted in Frank Herbert's Dune universe, in which genetic clones (and other creatures) are grown in 'Axolotl tanks'. The tanks are revealed to be 'people' as well.
- Used twice in the latest Matthew Reilly book "The Five Greatest warriors". The first appearance is when the team's Israeli defector is handed over to Mossad. He is suspended upside down in a tank, kept alive in order to spend the rest of his life as a living trophy alongside terrorists and Nazis (at least until his friends break him out). The second use is from a Russian general who created the method, only he doesn't limit his "trophies" to just terrorists.
- The immortal emperor of the Hawkwind books by Michael Moorecock keeps himself in such a device. Even holding rare audiences from his tank.
Roleplaying Games
- Battletech's Clans prize members known as Truebirths who are artificially conceived, gestated and born in growth cylinders. Conversely, Clansmen conceived and born the natural way are termed Freebirths and are generally held in contempt by Clan society.
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