People Jars

NO! Not the save frog!

"Maybe I'll just preserve myself fetal pig-style in a mason jar filled with the salty tears of all the heartbroken private school girls that will pine-uh for me-uh. That way, there'll be something left to re-animate once the zombie uprising cometh."

— Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email #168: "your funeral"

There is something creepy about people in jars. Jarring, even.

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 Energy. Some writers just love putting people in jars and especially love comparing them to insects or pickled specimens.

The people themselves are almost always alive, but unconscious, usually in some form of suspended animation.

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.

If the goal is specifically to extract some resource from the people, it's a form of Human Resources.

This is often how cryonics is depicted in fiction but is absolutely nothing like any Real Life equivalents.

Compare Brain in a Jar, Uterine Replicator, Healing Vat, Soul Jar, Living Museum Exhibit and Crystal Prison. Contrast to Man in the Machine, in which the subject (while still physically constrained by a container of some sort) is typically conscious, mobile, and/or able to express autonomy. See Our Homunculi Are Different for a common application of this trope. Sub-Trope of Jar of the Bizarre. See Our Clones Are Different; media often depicts clones being housed and/or created in these.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In the second season of Aldnoah.Zero, the comatose Princess Asseylum is seen like this after having been shot by Saazbaum at the end of the first part. She wakes up and leaves the pod towards the end and is not exactly happy when she learns what Slaine has been doing during her coma.
• During the Season 15 "Gotei 13 Invading Army" arc of the Bleach anime, Kagerosa Inaba is shown keeping reigai in large liquid-filled cylinders while performing experiments on them. In episode 336 both Kagerosa and Nozomi are shown inside the tubes as Kagerosa tries to fuse them together.
• In B't X, Metal Face is put in one after his big fight with Teppei.
• 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.
• In Delicious in Dungeon, one of the bonus pages shows Laios standing in front of a cabinet that's full of odd specimens, some of the humanoid, preserved in jars.
• In Divergence Eve, hundreds of these are kept by LeBlanc — worst of all, their occupants aren't dead.
• In Dragon Ball Z, Freeza's forces have a few types of these, all of which are used to greatly accelerate healing.
• In Elementalors, Asami is put in a tank while being Brainwashed.
• 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.
• Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) has the chimera clone of Tucker's dead daughter Nina.
• Gundam:
  • Mobile Fighter G Gundam:
    • In the Shinjuku arc, Rain Mikamura is briefly mind-controlled into walking inside an odd lair containing several people in jars like this, who happen to be the crewmates of other Gundam Fighters (Chibodee's Four-Girl Ensemble, Argo's jailer Natasha, Sai Saici's tutors Keiun and Zuisen, and George's Battle Butler Raymond; she probably would've "joined" them, had she not woken up at the last second. Then, she frees them from their collective Convenient Coma before they're forcefully infected with the DG Cells.
    • Later, an injured Allenby Beardsley is briefly kept in a "jar" before she's Brainwashed into fighting Domon and Rain in the Rantao Island Battle Royale.
  • Several characters are grown in jars in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. They all have issues.
  • In Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, the Psychickers used to power up the huge Mind Rape device Angel Halo are put in a trance and then locked inside pods in the Halo itself.
  • In ∀ Gundam, several Moonrace people are kept in jars and in suspended animation. Two of them are Queen Dianna Soleil and Teteth Halleh's mother Linda (it's all but stated that Teteth's reason to fight the heroes was to wake her up).
  • In After War Gundam X, Lucille Lilliant (Jamil's Cool Big Sis and first love) is put in a coma and placed in a capsule in suspended animation.
• Guyver has plenty of unfinished Zoanoids hanging out in jars... and one of the few instances in which you actually see someone leaving one of the jars without someone having to smash said jar first.
• In the eleventh episode of Hanaukyō Maid Team La Verite, Taro finds Mariel stored in a jar of liquid in an underground room.
• In Kagerou Project, after their deaths and being spat back out of the Daze, Takane and Haruka were put into large tanks beneath the school basement. Haruka (now Konoha) was woken up, but Takane's consciousness was somehow separated from her body, resulting in her transformation into Cyber Girl (and vicious Troll) Ene.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the dead body of Fate Testarossa's older sister Alicia (or, better said, the girl who 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.
• The second episode of Marvel Anime: Blade is centered around a People Farm. Existence, an underground society of vampires, fills it with young women and keeps them alive in water-filled jars to harvest their blood.
• In Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, Noel and Coco are imprisoned in underwater fish tanks. Gackto also wants to trap the girls in this.
• In Monster Rancher, we find out that a majority of Monsters were born in test tubes. Moo was engineered to be a Super-Soldier to end the Last War but was too strong to control. This ends up disturbing the characters when they eventually find a Monster manufacturing plant, with Mocchi asking if he was born there.
• Naruto:
  • Orochimaru's bases often have people in jars in them as experiments — for example, Suigetsu, who is released by Sasuke to join him.
  • Yamato was also this as a child, being the only surviving/successful test subject of an experiment to infuse humans with some of the first hokage's DNA in order to give them his kekkai genkai. He was "rescued" by Danzo after the latter realized one of the test subjects still lived and recruited into ROOT.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Rei spends a long time floating in a jar filled with LCL. Later, dozens of mindless clones of Rei grown as substitute Eva pilots show up.
  • It's implied that there is a similar tank full of Kaworu clones, as Units 05-13 use Kaworu-powered dummy plugs. In the manga, we see the original in a jar.
• In Noein, the people from the possible future try to put Haruka in a jar.
• In chapter 839 of One Piece, Sanji is horrified to discover a room in the Germa Kingdom full of all kinds of soldiers in capsules.
• In Outlaw Star, Melfina climbs into a tank naked to provide special navigation.
• Puella Magi Kazumi Magica: This is where the Pleiades keep the bodies of the magical girls whose soul gems they take to persevere them in containment.
• Reborn! (2004) has Mukuro chained in a jar after certain plot points.
• In Tenchi Muyo!, Ryoko ends up put in one of these via Big Bad Kagato. She releases herself when Tenchi is almost killed. Almost at the same time, Mihoshi finds Washu in a similar situation, only it's a Crystal Prison.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Former Big Bad Lordgenome 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 Technobabble about the Anti-Spirals and the series' backstory. In the very end, he does get his body back and goes out in a blaze of glory.
• Trigun:
  • In the SEEDs flashback, after the crew studies Tessla so extensively that they give her cancer and she dies, they dissect her corpse and leave it floating in a giant jar... where Vash and Knives find it some years later, prompting cute little Knives' Face–Heel Turn and determination to Kill All Humans.
  • All of the normal plants live in big glass bulbs and produce goods and energy. They're not human, but they are people.
  • Knives recovers in one and comes out naked. He does not seem to care.
• In Wolf's Rain, Cheza is in a jar being studied by Cher Degre before she's 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... and spilled wolf's blood in general triggers Cheza's scream reflex.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! R: Subverted. The lab in Kaiba Corp's basement is meant for testing holographic projectors, so none of the monsters floating inside the glass tubes are real. There is an actual person in one of the tubes, but he put himself in there as a practical joke and can easily let himself back out.
• In YuYu Hakusho, after being cut in half, Hiei is put in a tank to heal.

Comic Books

• In Gotham City Garage, Lex Luthor kidnaps the world's greatest geniuses, imprisons them in pods and mind-controls them into working for him.
  Nightwing: The Hell is this place?
  Supergirl: It's a computer. A neural network of ridealongs inside cryogenically frozen geniuses. A super-cooled processor made of human brains — and every one of them has at least three PhDs at the end of their name. We're looking at the smartest people in the world.
  Catwoman: Oh, Lex. You never did like competition.
• Hellboy:
  • In 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.
  • In Abe Sapien's origin story, he's found by workers underneath a hospital in Washington D.C., floating in a suspended animation tank with a note that has the date of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and the word icthyos sapien.
• Iron Man: When he decides to try to ruin Tony Stark's life a second time, Obadiah Stane kidnaps several of his friends and colleagues and imprisons them in tubes in a state of suspended animation. The room in which these tubes are in is also rigged with motion sensors that, once activated, will cause the occupants to be electrocuted in the event that Iron Man attempts a rescue. Stane doesn't quite count on catching Tony in just the right position to permit him to disable the trap with his Uni-beam, though.
• Justice Society of America: The "Stealing Thunder" arc has the entire metahuman community put in jars, with a few exceptions — mostly escapees and specific heroes that he needed for his own purposes. This is achieved by taking over the mind of Johnny Thunder and recalling the Thunderbolt genie from Jakeem Thunder.
• De Kiekeboes: The characters are put in jars in the album Kiekebanus.
• People who've committed crimes in The Motherless Oven are preserved in jars with tubing and strange liquid until they reach their Death Day, which could be either the next week or not for another few decades. Vera and Castro break Scarper out of a jar in the second book.
• Scott Pilgrim: Ramona's 7th evil ex, Gideon, has some sort of big spaceship thing in which he keeps his own 7 evil exes frozen in tubes, awaiting the day when they will go out with him.
• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #622, after Jack Russell is infected with the zombie virus, Morbius keeps him in one of these until he can find a cure.
• Spirou & Fantasio: In Le Tombeau des Champignac, the ice princess is preserved inside a giant glass jar filled with some transparent liquid.
• Superboy (1994): In one annual issue, Superboy, who was Cadmus's thirteenth and only successful Superman clone is recalled to the project when they recover the bodies of the previous twelve, all of whom are in glass stasis capsules, except for the sixth who's body is dangling half-out of his damaged capsule.
• Supergirl:
  • The Unknown Supergirl reveals that the Bottle City of Kandor has "The Hall of Sleepers", a chamber where volunteers are placed into a state of suspended animation inside transparent cylindrical pods to be awakened one thousand years later.
  • In The Other Side of Doomsday, Linda Danvers, Flash's wife Iris Allen and Atom's fiancée Jean Loring are abducted by villain T.O. Morrow and teleported into three transparent cylindrical tubes.
  • In an issue of Supergirl (1982), Supergirl is captured by a criminal organization and dumped into a containment unit after getting cloned.
  • In Death & the Family, when Gangbuster breaks into Insect Queen's hive, he finds Supergirl encased in a jewel-like pod and floating in an orange liquid.
  • A flashback in Last Daughter of Krypton shows several alien embryos being floating in a jar filled with orange, bubbly fluid while they are being genetically engineered into become Worldkillers. Another flashback shows Kara floating in a liquid-filled transparent cylinder while Zor-El corrects alleged genetic flaws.
  • In Crucible, Supergirl discovers dozens of large, liquid-filled cylinders cluttering Korstus' lab chambers. Her friends are imprisoned in some of them, but most of tubes are incubators for Superboy's clones, all of which are floating silently in some kind of yellowish fluid.
  • In The Killers of Krypton, dozens of aliens trapped in liquid-filled transparent cylinders are found in Harry Hokum's science labs.
• Superman:
  • The people of the city of Kandor spend most of their time in a jar, but it's not quite this trope in the usual sense; the entire city is in the jar, and the people inside are just going about their daily lives and trying to ignore that their universe effectively ends at the City Limits signs. They probably consider this better than the alternative, given that pretty much every other Kryptonian city blew up along with Krypton itself.
  • In The Immortal Superman, three super-heroes who try to apprehend an energy beast are put in cryo-freezing crystal pods when the monster's attacks put them in a coma.
  • In The Life Story of Superman, Lex Luthor grows a Superman clone inside a transparent vat filled with a greenish substance.
  • In Superman and Spider-Man, Doctor Doom manages to capture and put Hulk and Wonder Woman in transparent stasis tubes.
  • In The Phantom Zone, when Kryptonian lawmen barge into Faora Hu-Ul's farm to ascertain what happened to twenty-three persons who disappearing after visiting her farm, they find her surviving victims naked and hanging upside-down inside membranous sacs filled with a strange glowing gas to preserve the bodies.
  • In the Elseworld series Superman: Secret Identity, after young Clark Kent is captured by the U.S. government, he wakes up floating in one of these and surrounded by dozens of similar ones containing the murdered victims of others (from infants to adults) who the government has captured and experimented on.
• In The Ultimates (2002), the Chitauri capture the Wasp in her wasp size and place her inside a test tube. Herr Kleiser keeps her around as a pet.
• Unstoppable Doom Patrol has Mento being kept in a tank while immersed in an unknown liquid.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Judgment In Infinity: Persons abducted by the Adjudicator are imprisoned in individual crystalline spheres.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): In her quest for immortality without constant decay, Morgan La Fey nabs Jason Blood, Vandal Savage and other immortals and sticks them in stasis in tubes while catching the others she intends to grab for her plan.
• In X-Factor (2006), after Darwin is captured by Project Karma, he's undressed and awakens to find himself naked in a huge tank full of liquid, where they keep him imprisoned, fully conscious, while they perform experiments on him. He's rescued by the rest of the team soon enough.
• Nate Grey was grown in one of these, and burst out as a teenager. He consequently has very bad associations with them, and has a full on PTSD meltdown when he's locked in one in Uncanny X-Men (2018) many years later.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side:
  • There have been quite a few strips of the "humans are bugs" variety. One involves 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.
  • There are also the incidents with the Hatfields and McCoys being put in the same jar, and "On the Sixth Day", in which God adds humans to his recipe for Earth, "Jerks in a spice jar".
  • In another strip, 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.

Fan Works

• Thunderstorm of Calvin & Hobbes: The Series plays with this — there are several people in one jar.
• The Child of Love: In the sequel, Rei spends a while floating inside a cylindrical transparent tube, wondering whether she should terminate the remaining Yui clones -and finally becoming her own person- or leave them alone in case her current body gets destroyed in battle. Later the remaining clones appear, floating in their liquid-filled tank.
• In chapter 20 of Children of an Elder God, the clones of Rei are seen swimming inside their huge liquid-filled tank (and trying to break the glass to escape).
• In the Hellsister Trilogy, Darkseid's minions shove Satan Girl into one after extracting her baby.
  Satan Girl: A woman knows when she no longer carries a child. I know not who took it from me. I was liberated from the prison you had placed me in. The one who took me from it placed me in a coma before I could see his face. I awoke in a large tube, with a red-sun lamp above me and my arms' veins pierced with nutriment tubes. My child was gone... That was all I was wanted for. I tore the needles from my arms and opened the tube's hatch. There was no one in the chamber.
• In Human Curiosity, it turns out that the HCS was "killing" nations by shutting off their healing abilities, shooting them up with deadly poison, and freezing them into stasis in a pod. It's revealed later that the only reason they bothered preserving them instead of killing the nations outright is that they were afraid doing so would somehow hurt the people living in the nations.
• The Job Gone Wrong has Bio-Storage from the Weapon X facility. When young Gambit is captured, he's hooked to a respirator, put on IV and wires and dunked into a tube, in which he sleeps for two weeks before his adoptive father rescues him.
• In Kara of Rokyn, Lex Luthor manages to trap Superman into a vat full of Parasite's shapeless body.
• In Know Thyself, after the Council gives the go-ahead for Harry to attend Hogwarts and learn magic for the war effort, they manage to steal and jury rig an unused pod from the machine power plant and essentially re-plug Harry into it — bald head, wires, amniotic fluid and all — in a safe place under observation so that Harry can attend full-time at Boarding School.
• Once More with Feeling: Rei spends several scenes floating inside a transparent vat filled with LCL, healing her body or downloading her memories in her clones' brains.
• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space: The Mad Scientist Laboratory of Dr. Zarkendorf is lined with transparent chambers each holding a gorgeous naked woman, their intimate regions covered by strategically placed machinery. When Captain Proton orders these lovely ladies to be freed from their 'toothbrush holders', Dr. Zarkendorf considers this an excellent idea and activates the women (who have been turned into his cyborg army) to attack Proton.
• Rise of the Galeforces, naturally, showcases cloned Supers from the Golden Era in these, particularly in the first two parts.
• Rocketship Voyager: When the Caretaker is showing Captain Janeway and her officers around his archive, one of the exhibits is a woman abducted from Earth kept in a suspended animation tank. He asks for another Terran female for his archive in exchange for giving Voyager passage back to Earth. Janeway's response is to put a bullet in the tank, which gets them thrown off the Array.
• The severed but living head of Jonathan Joestar resides in a jar in Sapphire Heartverse. The fluid inside is a magic elixir that keeps him alive and nourishes him, though he is able to leave his jar for some time and bounce around. This trope also applies to the rest of the resurrected heads of deceased characters like Erina, Speedwagon and Zeppeli, as well as Steely Dan amd Alessi who are reduced to severed heads as punishment.
• In The Second Try, Rei's clones are shown floating in their 'aquarium' right after Armisael's defeat.
• Tamers Forever Series: In the Apex, the core of the four Quadrants. There's the first five failed Takato bodies, a spot for the sixth one: Takato Matsuki, the seventh one: Gabrielle/Takako, and a spot for the eighth one: Takato Tachikawa.
• In the first chapters of Thousand Shinji, Rei and her clones are seen several times floating in their fluid-filled tank.

Films — Animated

• DC Universe Animated Original Movies:
  • 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 more freaked out when the prototype clone slices through them with his heat vision.
  • The Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen feature Superboy's creation similar to the comics. The rest of the (failed) clones are eventually released by Luthor on the scientist in charge when he screws up one too many times.
• 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. X-23 is one of those babies.
• In Pokémon: The First Movie, all of the clones are created in containers like this. Much of Mewtwo's life is shown in such a container.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien: Resurrection has various Ripley clones in jars. Since the Ripleys in question are the least successful of a batch of human-Xenomorph hybrids, this is stretching the definition of "people" quite a bit.
• Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery has a cryogenic storage facility with frozen celebrities in pods, amongst them◊ Vanilla Ice.
• In Batman & Robin, Mr. Freeze's wife suffers from a fatal disease called MacGregor's Syndrome. He keeps her in suspended animation in a liquid-filled tube while he works on a cure.
• The Big Hurt ends with the Intrepid Reporter confronting the people behind a Government Conspiracy to develop a mind-control drug in a laboratory with nude women trapped inside glass cylinders filled with water and kept alive by scuba-style breathing apparatus.
• Blade: Trinity features a warehouse, one of many, where brain-dead people are kept in storage within what is at best described as a giant, airtight zip-lock bag for backup food supply. This was actually already in cut content from Blade (1998).
• There's a bizarrely funny scene in Bride of Frankenstein in which Dr. Praetorius shows off his work in creating life — little people (and a mermaid, "an experiment with seaweed") in jars. In a special effects 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 Clonus, clones are stuffed into giant plastic bags before being shipped to America.
• In A Cure for Wellness, hydrotherapy and sensory deprivation tanks are both used for the eponymous 'cure'. While Exploring the Evil Lair, the protagonist hides in a dark room only to turn on the lights and find it's full of naked people floating in tanks, including the executive he'd been sent to find. He thinks they've been killed, but the executive is later produced alive, and Lockhart is shown in the same tanks when he starts falling under the Mad Doctor's control.
• A version of this◊ is used to store the humans being harvested for blood in Daybreakers.
• The pickled fetuses with the eponymous deformity in The Devil's Backbone. Unusually, the doctor who keeps these curiosities is a good guy.
• The Spacing Guild navigators in Dune (1984) are essentially mutated ex-humans in jars.
• In The Fifth Element, Leeloo is reconstructed from her hand in such a container. Later, the heroes are shown recuperating in the said jar.
• Used beneficially in Hellboy (2004) when Abe is placed in a water-filled glass tube to recuperate after being injured by Samael. Due to his fishy nature, it's probably more comfortable and useful than putting him on a hospital bed, although it's not clear how he's supposed to get out again.
• In Independence Day, a trio of aliens who died in the Roswell, New Mexico crash are kept on display in a vault at Area 51.
• In The Matrix, humans are kept in jars and used as batteries for the machines. La Résistance's job is to free them by first freeing their minds from the Matrix and then freeing them from their jars.
• Not jars precisely, but those convicted of future murders in Minority Report are kept in an artificially induced coma in a warehouse-like facility. The precogs themselves float/are submerged in a pool of pale liquid.
• 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.
• Messing with Dead People Jars starts the whole brain-eating incident in The Return of the Living Dead when two employees of a medical-supply company carelessly rupture a zombie's containment tank.
• Return to Oz combines this with Human Head on the Wall in the form of Princess Mombi's hall of stolen heads in display cases. They're still alive, and Mombi can take off her own head and replace it with one from her collection.
• Starship Troopers puts the protagonist into a jar after being so heavily wounded that he lists as KIA. He heals quickly for the next battle.
• Star Wars:
  • In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker recovers from ice monster injuries and near hypothermia in a bacta tank.
  • Also in The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite could be seen as a variation of the trope.
  • The Expanded Universe and prequels have clones in jars. On Kamino, the cloned fetuses are grown in pods filled with nutrients. Pretty 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 the night. This was the case of a batch of young clones whose vision was not 100% perfect."
  • In The Rise of Skywalker, when Kylo Ren explores Snoke's hideout on Exegol, he passes several tanks holding clones of Snoke.
• They Saved Hitler's Brain — actually, his entire live, sentient head. Clearly an influence on Futurama.
• In Timber Falls, Ida keeps the fetuses from her failed pregnancies in Mason jars in the cellar.
• 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 as well.
• Combined with Brain in a Jar in The Whisperer in Darkness. The bodies are stored separately in a cave which the protagonist later enters, horrified to find the headless corpse plugged into tubes and twitching as if still alive.
• In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Colonel Stryker collects mutants in glass tanks, where they stay naked in suspended animation, covered in white powder. Stryker's own son is kept in one of these.

Literature

• Brave New World has the human race conditioning each member of the species by birthing them in jars. Some jars are induced with alcohol and others are violently shaken so as to cause the embryo to experience arrested development, making the individual more suitable to the mundane task to which it had been predestined.
• In the short story "Sergeant Nice" from Break of Dark, aliens are seen to have some of these. Specifically, they have a set of what are described as "huge glass bottles, like in the biology lab at school", in which are kept the various organs and parts of the cats and dogs and the one little girl they've vivisected. The heads of the unfortunates are still alive, set on top of each bottle.
• In A Certain Magical Index, Aleister Crowley floats upside-down in one, having his entire body save his consciousness rely entirely on machinery. In Volume 22 of the novels, however, it's revealed that he may be capable of omnipresence, appearing before Fiamma of the Right to defeat him while simultaneously still being in his jar.
• Coma manages 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.
• Used and subverted in Dune, in which genetic clones (and other creatures) are grown in 'Axolotl tanks'. The tanks are revealed to be 'people' as well.
• In Durarara!!, Celty's head is kept in a little jar.
• Used twice in the 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 by a Russian general who created the method, only he doesn't limit his "trophies" to just terrorists.
• In Gor, this is how Earth women are transported to Gor to become Gorean slave girls. In particular, Assassin of Gor has a scene where women in jars are delivered from a transport ship, and then removed from the jars and tied up for transport by more mundane (for Gor) means to the slave kennels.
• The immortal emperor of the Hawkwind books by Michael Moorcock keeps himself in such a device, even holding rare audiences from his tank.
• In Johannes Cabal, the titular Necromancer sometimes uses these for corpse storage:
  • Johannes keeps the body of his Lost Lenore under the floor of his lab in a glass tank filled with a glowing magical preservative, which insulates it from the effects of time while he searches for a method of true resurrection. At the start of the series, it's been over eight years.
  • Johannes steals Alisha's body after The Brothers Cabal but has to make do with stowing her in a barrel of magical preservative. He's in a hurry to resurrect her as well, leaving his brother quite disturbed to watch him tip over the barrel and slosh out the naked corpse.
• One memorable scene in The Journeyer has Marco taken captive and locked into a large clay jar full of sesame oil, with a collar around his neck. While he's locked in, he has a visitor who explains that the victim's neck eventually softens, removing the head from the body whilst keeping the head intact. He manages to break the jar and escape, but as he runs away, he steps in a large, soft mass.
• 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 a feeding tube, with no augmentations. Neither unit had ever existed outside the tube until the meteor hit...
• In Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille dips a woman in a vat full of molten grease in a failed effort to extract her scent.
• In 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).
• In Pyramids, the embalmers of Djelibeybi preserve the dead by pickling their remains. At one point, the late king's spirit looks in on the process, and sees his own body lying rather sadly in a vat of fluid "like the last gherkin in the jar".
• In Scrapped Princess, Lord Renard plans 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.
• In The Secret of the Ninth Planet by Donald A. Wollheim, the Plutonians keep samples of sentient species preserved in suspended animation tanks. They plan to add our hero to their collection, so he starts smashing the tanks and as each alien regains consciousness it joins the fight and soon there are no more Plutonians.
• The Ship Who...:
  • "Shell people" 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.
  • In The Ship Who Searched, a girl about the age of ten goes 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. 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.
  • Some related stories have adult soldiers being converted into cyborg ships, again only after being severely injured in the line of duty. In general, the world seems to consider it better than being extensively paralyzed, and it's treated as an extensive prosthetic option.
• In the Spatterjay series by Neal Asher, some of the mostly immortal villains are trapped in large jar prisons. These are normally filled with a non-breathable gas but for celebrations, they will be filled with oxygen and the villains will be given food.
• The Star Diaries: In the third story from Memoirs of a Space Traveller: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, a creepy scientist keeps specimens obtained by cloning experiments in such jars. For the most part, they aren't humans, but one large tank holds the body of the scientist himself, whose clone the current host of the laboratory turns out to be.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Human clones are grown in "Spaarti cylinders". It's generally accepted that it takes three to five years or a year at the very most to grow a trained, battle-ready clone whose life sucks immeasurably; any less than a year and the clone tends to be unstable and develop Clone Madness, though if a ysalamiri is nearby, the process can be shortened to under 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.
  • Galaxy of Fear: Ghost of the Jedi features a morgue full of bodies in cryogenic tanks. It turns out that they're alive in stasis. Their Life Energy has been siphoned away for study, but it can be put back.
• Time Lord Fairy Tales has these in the story "The Grief Collector" — the title character is a Collector of the Strange who likes to collect others' tears of grief. He does this by kidnapping their loved ones (who seem to simply vanish) and putting them in jars in his mansion. Then he heads out to collect the tears of the bereaved and store those in jars.
• The Tripods: In The City of Gold and Lead, the narrator wonders why no women are seen in the Tripod city. Then his Master takes him to a place where human females are kept preserved like butterflies. Knowing what he's going to find, he goes through the collection until he finds the preserved body of a woman who he fell in love with in a previous novel, then says that he's seen enough.

Live-Action TV

• Lindsey's Heel–Face Turn in Angel is caused by the discovery of people in jars for organ harvesting.
• Babylon 5:
  • Lyta Alexander reveals that the Vorlons kidnap humans, genetically engineer telepathic humans, and then grow them in jars.
  • The Shadow-modified telepaths are stored (in "jars") on the station, and later used to disable a group of Clark-loyal ships, allowing the B5 forces to score a practically bloodless victory against three dozen destroyers. Or... bloodless except for the telepaths.
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), humanoid Cylons who show signs of personality aberrations are 'boxed' to quarantine them from infecting the rest of the Cylons with their aberrations/ideas.
• Boba Fett takes plenty of bacta tank baths in The Book of Boba Fett.
• Dark Angel: Max spends some time in a jar.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Face of Boe is a giant (human-sized) head floating in a jar, said to be as old as the universe.
  • The Sisters of Plenitude in "New Earth" keep thousands of infected humans(ish) sealed in tanks.
• Game of Thrones: Selyse Baratheon keeps her stillborn children in jars in her quarters on Dragonstone.
• 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.
• 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.
• Space: Above and Beyond features a number of scenes (mostly flashbacks) of InVitros in the tanks they were "bred" and developed to physical maturity in.
• In the Stargate Universe episode "Space", two crew members are rescued from these.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • "Space Seed" shows Khan and his followers in cryogenic storage.
    • In "The Empath", Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find the bodies of two missing researchers encased in jars. Ominously, they then discover three empty jars labelled with their names.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "The Neutral Zone", Data finds a cryogenic pod containing three frozen American humans from the early 21st century.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In the episode "The 37's", the ship finds pods containing people kidnapped from Earth in 1937. One is Amelia Earhart.
  • The Borg assimilate children as young as newborns by placing them in Borg Maturation Chambers until they've grown into adulthood. While inside, the assimilation process makes them more cybernetic than if they were assimilated as an adult and feeds them more Borg programming.
• The Visitor ships in V (1983) store thousands of encased humans in suspended animation so they can be shipped to the aliens' home planet as food.
• Given how experiments on humans, aliens and hybrids are common in The X-Files, this happens every now and then. They are stored in large tanks with green water.

Music

• The Frank Zappa song "Sleeping in a Jar": "It's the middle of the night and your mommy and your daddy are sleeping (...) in a jar/ the jar is under the bed."

Pinball

• The Tube Dancers in Big Bang Bar are green-skinned space babes who dance seductively while suspended in jars filled with bubbling liquid.
• In Tales of the Arabian Nights, the evil genie keeps the princess trapped in a glass bottle.

Radio

• Earthsearch: While in a Lady Land society, Darv forces one of the women to show him where the men are kept. She takes him to the suspended animation chambers where all the males are kept until needed for breeding purposes.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Clans' prize members are known as Trueborns, who are artificially conceived, gestated and born in growth cylinders. Conversely, Clansmen conceived and born the natural way are termed Freeborn (or Freebirths if a Trueborn is feeling particularly contemptuous) and are generally held in contempt by Clan society.
• GURPS Bio-Tech has stats for this item.
• In the It Came from the Late, Late Show II adventure "Mummy Dearest", in Dr. Morbachev's laboratory, there are test tubes the size of people along a wall. They hold three or four of the innocent people kidnapped by Dr. Morbachev, kept in computer-controlled suspended animation.
• Magic: The Gathering features Ashnod's Transmogrant, which makes your creature slightly stronger... And turns them into an artifact, a.k.a. a machine.
• Paranoia: In early editions, clones are created inside liquid-filled tubes and stay in the tubes until they grow to baby size. They're then decanted and allowed to grow up normally. In the most recent edition (Paranoia XP), clones are kept in tubes until their previous active member is killed, and are then decanted, have their previous active member's memories implanted in them and become the new active member.
• Res Arcana:
  • The male Demonologist has three jars containing demons on and around his desk.
  • The Homunculus is a scaly demon grown in a jar.
• In the Villains & Vigilantes adventure Devil's Domain, in the Science Room, the Player Characters will discover grisly-looking mutant babies growing in glass vats. The Devil plans to use these mutant demonic monsters as his servants when they attain their full growth.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • New Space Marine Chapters are created by force-culturing gene-seed in cloned humans in jars, each of whom has to go through the agonising process of having the auxiliary organs implanted so they (the organs, not the clones) can go through their natural life-cycle and produce two Progenoids for each set implanted, doubling and testing each "generation" until there's 1000 "pure" gene-seed sets ready for implantation into the real soldiers. Naturally, this only works on pubescent children because it keys off their natural hormonal changes.
  • Space Marine Dreadnoughts are essentially heavily armed and armoured people jars, serving as life support for the mortally wounded marines they're piloted by. Ork dreadnoughts are similar, although in their case, the occupants are not usually mortally wounded before being wired into the machines.
  • There's also the Dark Eldar. Most of them are grown artificially, whereas having normally conceived children, the "trueborn" as they're called, is a privilege only afforded to the higher-ranking Dark Eldar nobles. This explains why the Dark Eldar are actually thriving while their good... er, Craftworld cousins are a Dying Race.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • Stasis tubes are used in the Metru Nui Archives to preserve Rahi (animals). The Shadowed One keeps a Toa in a stasis tube as a trophy in his base, similar to Jabba keeping Han Solo in his palace.
  • Toa Canisters are used to transport Toa, though they're not transparent, and sometimes (like with the Matoran who became the Toa Inika) the occupants are conscious while they're inside.
• LEGO Galaxy Squad: The Buggoids trap people in transparent purple cocoons for ambiguous reasons.
• 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. (She and many fans.)

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: At several facilities beneath The Consortium's underground base, there are various containment jars holding a victim of the Mechanika Virus with a research panel besides each holding a report of how the virus affected the body conditions and the reactions to experimental stimulation. There are also containments for variants such as The Eroder, with a full report on the computer panel detailing it's capabilities and how much danger it can create when loose.
• Baldur's Gate II:
  • To show just how evil Jon Irenicus is, one of the first big rooms the party can find themselves in is full of jars of the man's previous servants put in there when they entered a forbidden room or asked too many questions. They are trapped and alive in the tanks, and completely forgotten by him. In another room, there's another man put there, supposedly until Jon gets around to healing him (and like before, the man either forgot or didn't care anymore). He begs to be put out of his misery, implying that he was alive and in pain for years. Imoen remarks "The things in these tanks... they used to be people."
  • Also, later on, he imprisons several members of the Shadow Thieves and uses them to perform some evil ritual meant to steal the main character's Baalspawn soul.
  • To return to Chateau Irenicus again, sometime after finding the aforementioned rooms you find another lab full of partially-grown (and partially-assembled) clones of Irenicus' old love interest, which he's been growing in an attempt to inspire any emotion in his soulless state. Safe to say, Irenicus loves his creepy glassware.
• In Battleborn, the various Mike clones are grown and kept in large glass vats before being "born".
• In Beyond Good & Evil, the victims on the Moon are kept in creepily organic capsules embedded into the wall of the Great Crypt.
• In Bionic Heart, Richard, the Corrupt Corporate Executive who the main character works for, has captured and preserved some of the greatest minds from the last 50 years into People Jars so that he can place their brains into android Prototypes and use them for personal gain.
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter has headless clones of its Winged Humanoid Nina^note in a departure from the usual Breath of Fire Nina character, not a princess, but a mutilated, genetically engineered little girl who is legally considered an experimental animal... in jars. Even worse, the plan is to use the headless Ninas as essentially living air filters to remove the pollution accumulated by people living 1000 years underground in a Crapsack World.
• In Castle Crashers, after you're abducted by the aliens (from Alien Hominid), if you go to the left at the start of the level (as opposed to the right) there is an Easter Egg that features the Castle Crashers development team contained by the aliens in individual jars.
• Chrono Cross: One scene has Serge switch bodies with Lynx. This leads to a sequence in which Serge-as-Lynx has to clone himself and take over that body. We see that body grow in a jar until, at Serge's exact age, the jar shatters. This scene is popular with the female fans.
• In Chrono Trigger, right before the boss battle in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, you see all the playable characters floating in the tanks (except the Optional Party Member). These are the memories of the party, which Zeal obtained via her time-bending Black Omen.
• City of Heroes:
  • One mission used in both City of Heroes and City of Villains takes place in a lab where Crey Industries manufactures the Paragon Protectors, featuring a room filled with jars of cloned superpowered humans.
  • The Arachnos Base mission set features Arachnoids (failed super soldiers rumored to be made from Lord Recluse's DNA) and incomplete Tarantulas (cybernetic robot spider exosuits made by permanently and brutally hooking humans in — you need to see them to get it) in jars of red fluid attached to the walls.
• The ClueFinders 5th Grade Adventures: The Secret of the Living Volcano has both humans and animals being kept in a type of these by aliens who want to eat their brains.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series:
  • CABAL stands for 'Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform'. Nod's Master Computer derives much of his/its intelligence and computing power from the brains of numerous humans suspended in fluid cylinders.
  • The Nod ending from the Tiberian Sun: Firestorm expansion shows Kane in one of these tubes, raising further questions about exactly who or what he is. Later games reveal that he is a millennia-old alien and was recovering at the time.
• In a mission midway through Crusader: No Remorse, the Silencer finds a facility where a bunch of Silencers are apparently being cloned to adulthood. In the last area, there are fully-grown (or nearly) naked people in jars. He kills the scientist who was working on them — but not before the scientist taunts him, implying he might have been in such a tank. Then he's ordered to kill them. He shoots the jars, and the people, still attached to the inside of the jar by wires or cables or feeding tubes, fall out and hang limply in space. Because he's unfeeling like that.
• One of the fighters in Cyberbots is a girl in a jar who hijacked a robot to escape from the government facility where she was stored. She beats up everyone she comes across due to fear and extreme misunderstandings.
• CyberStorm: Vats are used to grow, maintain and recycle Bioderms while they're still alive. It's like an immoral, compact hospital.
• Dead Space has some in the Ishimura's body-part cloning farm.
• JC Denton finds a few people in tanks during the course of Deus Ex, along with the implication that he may have started as one.
• Duke Nukem 3D contains a number of naked women in creepy organic jars, who quietly moan for the player to kill them if approached. They are so contained because Mars Needs Women.
• EarthBound Series: This a series-wide trope. In the first two games, they'll mostly just seem irritated with the whole circumstance. In the third game, their dialogue is chilling.
  • EarthBound Beginnings: Prior to the last fight against Giygas, the group finds a room with all the people who have been kidnapped by aliens stuffed in tubes.
  • EarthBound (1994) has a scene in an alien base in which you stumble across a bunch of characters who have been recently kidnapped, stuck in glass tubes. From the dialogue, it's implied that the aliens forgot to include air holes. Killing the boss shuts down the facility, which frees all the captives with no discernable damage to the tubes, despite the fact that there's no apparent means of egress whatsoever from the tubes. One has to assume that they'd automatically release as a failsafe, in case any of their own workers got caught inside.
  • In Mother 3, Porky puts people and animals in tubes filled with a bizarre green fluid in order to brainwash them into loving him.
• The capsuleers (read: players) in EVE Online. The most efficient way of controlling a ship in the 'verse is to put the pilot into a jar and then plug all of the ship's sensors and controls directly into the pilot's nervous system. In addition, capsuleers have one or more clones standing by in jars in case they are killed and need a new body.
• Fallout
  • In the original Fallout, the lower levels of the bombed-out Glow facility hold about 100 human-sized or bigger jars, with logs dating the process of the Forced Evolutionary Virus. Most of the jars are broken, even in the parts of the facility that escaped the bombing...
  • Fallout 3:
    • The mutated creatures in vats at Raven Rock, some of which are never encountered anywhere else in the game, leaving their purpose to speculation.
    • The residents of Vault 112 are kept alive in stasis while their brains live on inside a Lotus-Eater Machine.
    • The cryotubes on Mothership Zeta, in addition to housing various human captives, also contain Raiders, Feral Ghouls (possibly Reavers), and Super Mutants.
  • Cryogenic tubes also feature in Fallout 4, with the residents of Vault 111 being placed inside cryo-stasis tubes shortly after the bombs fall. Sadly, only one resident survives, the others dying in frozen airless coffins plus one bullet in the skull of your spouse. And, technically, there are two survivors, since the same creep that shot your spouse took your son away.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI has Espers in jars kept by The Empire to harness their magic.
  • Final Fantasy VII has Zack and Cloud stuck in tanks during their years of experimentation at the hands of Mad Scientist Hojo.
  • In Dirge of Cerberus, Vincent gets this treatment as well when he is put in a tank by Lucrecia to save his life. This one's a more benign example, but he wouldn't be in that tank in the first place if it weren't for Hojo shooting him and performing horrendous experiments on his half-dead body. Especially jarring in that the cutscene is shown in first-person POV from Vincent's perspective, so essentially the player is the one inside the tank, looking out of it and unable to move.
  • Final Fantasy IX had the Genome, some of whom are seen in jars. They also have creepy tendencies, but (since it's already canon that Zidane is male) they aren't clones since they have sex.
• Between Galaxy Angel: Eternal Lovers and Galaxy Angel II: Zettai Ryouiki no Tobira, Vanilla discovers Nano-Nano, an Artificial Human made of Nanomachines, in a jar.
• In Gears of War 2, Dom and Marcus enter an empty "research" facility with the hopes of finding vital information on the Locust's whereabouts. What they find is a building full of booby traps and an A.I. in control of the facility that's... less than friendly to them, not to mention cryo chambers full of "Sires" in jars (humans who were born while their parents were being affected by the Imulsion. Needless to say, they suffered horrible birth defects, and they were also completely savage). Obviously, they start breaking out of the cryo chambers once you get there, and you then have to fight off wave after wave of them. Not exactly the information they were looking for... Apparently, the Sires are the so-called "Forefathers of the Locust", although the Locust only seem savage but are highly organized, whereas the Sires are completely savage themselves.
• In Invasion: The Abductors, women are being kept in tubes throughout the Lab section of the alien mothership. Break the tubes to free them for bonus health and points.
• In Invisible Apartment, Sleepers are put in tanks which keep them alive, but in a coma. This is supposed to be done for medical purposes but is revealed to also be done to people who are inconvenient to the government.
• Kingdom Hearts has the Princesses kept in transparent crystal-like coffins in the topmost room of Hollow Bastion.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • The first KotOR game has a boss who captures Jedi and keeps their pretty-much-dead bodies in jars as an emergency power source. Both he and the player character can draw on these human batteries in the fight.
  • In both KotOR and KotOR II, injured people recuperate in tanks of healing fluid, and prisoners are kept in cells of a similar design.
• MapleStory has a scene like this — when the player selects a Resistance character and goes through the introductory cutscenes, they at one point end up in a laboratory where children are kept in jars by the evil scientist Dr. Gelmer. The player ends up rescuing one of these test subjects, named Vita, and later has several storyline quests involving Vita's recovery and contribution to the Resistance.
• Mass Effect 2 has the Collectors, who abduct humans and place them in stasis pods/jars. When you come across them during your final assault on the Collector base, you learn just what they're being used for: the people are horrifically liquefied alive by nanites (including several members of your crew if you're not fast enough to save them) and used as building material for a new kind of Reaper.
• Metal Slug 6 has your player infiltrating an Invader hive in the final mission. In the core of the Invader base, you can uncover dozens and dozens of pods containing enslaved Martians, the Invaders' natural enemies, presumably as food supply. Shooting and destroying those jars will release the Martians, who will then summon their UFOs to drop supplies and weapons for you before they leave.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, you find Uxie, Mesprit, and Azelf trapped in jars while Cyrus extracts the components needed to craft the Red Chain from their bodies. Examining them tells you that they're in great pain, and the scientists nearby are disturbed by the process.
  • In Pokémon Sun and Moon, alongside Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, Lusamine has a private collection of Pokémon frozen and suspended in tanks. For all her talk about loving Pokémon, she doesn't seem too concerned whether the Pokémon she loves are actually alive.
• In Policenauts, all of the kidnapped people are being kept in suspended animation in a secret base on the moon so that their organs can be harvested whenever they are needed.
• Portal: In Portal, Chell starts out in one of these. She does in Portal 2 as well, and at the end of the co-op mode, Atlas and P-Body discover thousands of them.
• A number of Psionic Games use this trope.
  • The first Being One game begins with you waking up inside such a jar, and manually unlocking it from the inside.
  • Killer Escape 3, tied into Being One's storyline, reveals that Dr. Rycroft and Weston Carnodyne had enlisted the help of aliens to collect hundreds of creatures in jars for Rycroft to study, be it vampires, lycans, or dinosaurs, all in his research into immortality.
  • Urbex has white metal pods that were meant to hold the mutated fly creatures until some of them got smart and released even more of them.
• In Resident Evil 5, the bad guys, for some random reason, have two massive chambers full of people to experiment on, which also act as elevator shafts. Jill Valentine spent some time in one of those jars.
• One of the enemy types in the final level of R-Type Delta is a fetus in a crystal.
• Scourge: Outbreak has the Nogari Corp's cloning facilities, an area filled with clones in stasis tanks. It subtly foreshadows that the player character is a clone, revealed near the end.
• In Starbound, these are a staple of any Miniknog research facility — both filled and empty jars. Practically every race will be revulsed by the sight.
• In Star Control II, Admiral ZEX keeps the last female Shofixti in cryogenic pods in his menagerie.
• The first generation of StarCraft has these things, which you can put on custom maps. One hidden level uses them to create Hybrids — the first viable example being a High Templar/Zergling.
• Star Trek: Elite Force: The first game has a level where it turns out that everyone "killed" on an alien ship was transported into jars to recuperate.
• Super Catboy introduces your titular hero in the FMV, floating in a stasis tank in the dogs' laboratory aboard a transport plane, when a malfunction casues him to unexpectedly wake up. Catboy then breaks loose, forcing the plane to crash, and cue gameplay.
• In the Subspace Emissary mode of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, several Subspace creatures can be found in tanks during one of the Halberd stages (including one who isn't found anywhere else in the game).
• In Tales of Innocence, a government project tries building Humongous Mecha powered by Tenseisha who have special powers derived from their status as the rebirth of heavenly beings. The battery, located in the back of the robot, is essentially a tube with a human suspended in green liquid. You get a party member by raiding a lab and destroying the machine she's powering; at the end of the game, the research director himself gets popped into one.
• Played and subverted rather humorously in ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, which involves capturing Earthlings by pelting them with jars until they've been trapped inside.
• In Total Distortion, teleporting in or out of dimensional planes requires the use of a steel tube filled with nutrient-rich liquid, as any organic beings are sent into a six-week coma when teleported. Since you paid to be teleported into the Distortion Dimension, you wake up in one of these as well at the start of the game.
• Unreal II: The Awakening features bits of people in jars. You can push buttons to make them twitch.
• In Warframe, the current specimens of Tyl Regor's aptly-titled "Tubemen" project can be seen all around the Grineer Sealab tileset. A variation of the Sabotage mission type involves destroying some of these to slow down his progress on completing them, as a major weakness of the Grineer Empire is the Clone Degradation that affects them all, which the Tubemen are intended to solve.
• X-COM:
  • X-COM: UFO Defense has people and cattle placed into jars and dissolved. The resulting slurry is injected intravenously as food by the aliens.
  • Alien stasis tanks also appear in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and can be sold freely;^note they're worth less if damaged in the fangame XCOM: Long War, you can use a number of these alongside alien surgery tables in a research project to speed up the wound recovery rate of your troops.
• Xenogears: The "Nanomachine Colony" Emeralda was sealed in a containment tank in Kim's lab, deep within the Zeboim Ruins, four thousand years before the game. Long before that, the mother of humanity, Elly was created by Abel's imagination, science, "God", or some combination thereof, and she awakens from a capsule, Kadomony, ejected from the Zohar during the Eldridge crash. Presumably, Cain and the Gazel are also created from the same device. Also, after being heavily injured by Ramsus, Fei and Elly end up in healing tanks in Melchior's house. Ramsus himself was created in a test tube by Krelian. Krelian's lab and the Soylent system also contain various human/humanoid parts floating about, some of which are in river-sized tubes.
  Melchior: Hey! Stop staring at the naked girl in the tank!
• Xenosaga has mutants... in jars. Realians are test-tube babies on a larger scale, although there is little evidence to suggest that they ever go back in after their initial awakening.
• X-Kaliber 2097 has the lab of Dr. Blast, with tanks of humans in liquid to be experimented upon to create more Morph mutants.

Web Animation

• The end of Dead Fantasy 3 has a number of humanoid "replicants" stored in liquid-filled tubes, and it's implied that the fighting girls came from the jars.
• Strong Bad Email: In "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.

Web Comics

• Blood is Mine:
  • Before being woken up, genetically modified people like Michelle and Caius are stored in glass containers.
  • Bunker B is full of containers with frozen human remains as a result of experiments with alien blood.
• Bob and George has a couple of instances:
  • One for X and one for Zero, in the present day, anyway. It's to store their bodies while their creators work on them.
  • In the final arc, George finds the Author trapped inside tubes in all three eras. The Author is fine. He can get out any time that he wants, but stays to maintain the illusion that Bob has successfully captured him.
• One of these serves as a prison for Michael Kappel in Collar 6.
• Girl Genius: 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 food/water and air). On the whole, the town population approved of his methods.
• The Girls in Space adventure "The Pickled Past" has alien people in jars.
• In Guilded Age, the five main characters are kept in this, as the world they live in is actually a The Matrix-style video game.
• Homestuck has giant chess pieces in jars in the meteor laboratory (implied to be one of many), it's apparently how both armies are created.
• This page of Inhuman is a great illustration of People Jars.
• 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 Our Little Adventure, it's revealed the Souballo Empire are creating humans to be used as their soldiers. These soldiers were grown in jars such as these.
• This happens somewhat frequently in Schlock Mercenary, though these people jars are used for medical purposes (typically regrowth — i.e., from just their head) more often than not. Then again, when all else fails, they seem to make effective restraints as well.
• In Sluggy Freelance, the secret to Oasis's ressurections is a cloning facility.
• Deconstructed in Spinnerette. The title character wakes up in one run by Dr. Universe when she's suffering from Phlebotinum Overload. Dr. Universe lampshades the drawbacks when Spinnerette almost drowns.
• Supermassive Black Hole A* has Selenis Zea operating a cloning facility that had her clones grown in transparent vats. In addition, she also had one of these used to clone an accomplice who crossed her.
• 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 Creepypasta "Dyscrasia", the narrator, a genetically engineered superhuman girl, goes into her teacher's laboratory and sees some of his failed experiments floating in these, along with cultured limbs and organs.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-395 ("The Bottle Baby") is a human fetus that lives in a specimen jar filled with formaldehyde. It is fed a mixture of milk and blood once per week.
  • SCP-1637 ("The Army of the Future"): SCP-1637-3C is a robot that controls SCP-1637 warbots. Its control unit is a fetus suspended in a liquid nitrogen solution.
• In the Whateley Universe story "The Op", the heroes launch a scout mission into the destroyed city and 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

• American Dad!:
  • In the season 4 premiere, "The Vacation Goo", Stan puts his family in jars filled with goo that gives them false memories that they went on vacation.
  • In a season 6 episode, Roger and Stan go to Area 51. In the background, an old woman can be seen floating in a jar. This is actually a Call-Back to a season one episode in which agents chase Roger, but Stan removes the wig from the old woman and convinces the agents that she's the alien.
• In the Amphibia Season 3 opening, shown after the credits of the Season 2 finale "True Colors", after having been stabbed by King Andrias, Marcy is kept in a healing pod for The Core to utilize her as a host.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Victor Fries a.k.a. Mr. Freeze keeps his wife, Nora, frozen in a jar until he can find a cure for her Soap Opera Disease.
• In the Big Hero 6: The Series "City of Monsters" arc, Arc Villain Di Amara creates monsters in an attempt to cure a patient in a cryostasis pod. The person she is trying to cure is Liv Amara, who put herself in stasis after infecting herself with a virus and created her clone Di to find a cure. She is later cured and awakens just in time to stop Di.
• In the Danny Phantom episode "Kindred Spirits", the clones of Danny are kept in cloning chambers full of ectoplasm.
• In the Dexter's Laboratory the episode "Momdark", the show's Big Bad, Mandark, abducts Dexter's mother and imprisons her in a suspended animation tank, where she is a state of blissful slumber, being completely unaware of what was occurring. She wakes up after hearing Dad say that Mandark "Missed a spot," and breaks out of her prison to clean up the spot. Strangely, she seems to be unaware of her kidnapping as she never questioned what happened to her.
• In an episode of Dilbert, 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.
• In the series finale of DuckTales (2017), Beakley, Scrooge, Webby, Dewey, and Louie discover May and June in pods while entering a F.O.W.L. secret lab in Funzos. It's all part of F.O.W.L.'s plan for them to find the pods so they can capture the McDuck Family and their friends.
• Futurama:
  • Cryonics tubes like the one Fry was preserved in are depicted as whole-body jars.
  • All the celebrities of our time are kept alive as heads in jars.
• Invader Zim:
  • Zim keeps a number of abducted human children in jars for his various experiments. One of them has the reoccurring gag that because Zim has operated on the pleasure center of his brain, he is completely and profoundly happy... all the time.
  • All Irkens are born this way. Giant tubes probably don't seem so horrific to them...
• In the Season 2 finale of Kaeloo, Olaf freezes Kaeloo and Mr. Cat alive and puts them in People Jars.
• The Changelings from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic seems to be capable of producing these as a means of immobilizing their enemies, as shown in "A Canterlot Wedding – Part 2", "To Where and Back Again – Part 2", and "Frenemies".
• The Bad Future seen in the Phineas and Ferb episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo" has kids being stored in jars until adulthood for their protection.
• In Pinky and the Brain, 20 Minutes into the Future, Bill and Hillary Clinton are still as acting as heads of the US as heads in jars.
• The Simpsons:
  • Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are put into these in "Treehouse of Horror VII". Clinton implies that this is a common occurrence for him...
  • "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?" has the Simpsons going on a tour of the newspaper industry. The tour guide leads them to a chamber where they store Dear Abby and Ann Landers in jars, keeping them in suspended animation except for one hour per week to dispense homespun wisdom.
    Dear Abby: My advice is to free us or let us die!
• The Strange Chores: Monsters captured by Helsing are imprisoned in small bottles using specialized firearms that suck the monster into the jar and shrink them. The monsters are still alive and aware of their surroundings, but are otherwise totally powerless.
• An episode of Teen Titans (2003) has all the heroes but Robin frozen in jars after they're captured by the villain of the week.
• The reserve clones of Dean and Hank Venture preserved in glass jars within the Venture compound in The Venture Bros., which is naturally Played for Laughs (using the Banana Peel gag on a "liberated" clone).
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: The Alteans that were "chosen" by Lotor are put in test tubes and drained of their quintessence.

Real Life

• Currently, international law bans growing fetuses outside any artifical environment past a few weeks, this includes animals. Scientists speculate that the technology to bring test animals to term is well within the grasp of modern science, but as its illegal we don't know.
  • This is unfortunate, as if healthy babies could be raised outside a living mother, then the abortion issue could be effectively ended, if a method for safely transfering fetuses to a gestation pod was likewise developed.It would also open new avenues for those struggling/unable to have children.
    • But it would also take years of reseach, development, refining, and metric ton of money- also that law being amended.
• Stillborn human fetuses, like many other types of biological specimen, have been preserved in jars, generally for the purpose of medical education and research.
• Aborted human fetuses were kept in jars by late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell. They were not used for medical research purposes. The police raided his office on a tip that suspected Gosnell of illegal distribution of prescription painkillers when the jars were found. The Pennsylvania District Attorney said that the jars were lined on the walls like trophies.

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