People Jars



""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 for me. That way, there'll be something left to re-animate once the zombie uprising cometh.""

- Strong Bad, sbemail #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 Force. 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.

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, Soul Jar, Crystal Prison and Girl in A Box, a gender-specific form of this trope. See Uncanny Valley for the audience's reaction.

Anime and Manga

 * B't X: Metal Face was in one after his big fight with Teppei.
 * Chrono Crusade: In a flashback, 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.
 * Dragonball Z: Any Saiyan that ends up hurt gets put in one to heal much faster than they normally would.
 * Heck, anyone under Frieza's command gets put into a healing tank to recover; even Frieza himself gets this treatment.
 * Durarara!!...sort of. Celty's head is kept in a little people jar.
 * Elementalors: Asami is put in a tank as a form of being Brainwashed.
 * Ergo Proxy: It turns out that the humans who survived the ecological collapse, 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: The anime has the chimera clone of Tucker's dead daughter Nina.
 * G Gundam: In the Shinjuku arc, 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,
 * Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny:Several characters were grown in jars. They all have issues.
 * 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.
 * Hanaukyo Maid Tai La Verite: In episode 11 Taro finds Mariel stored in a jar of liquid in an underground room.
 * Katekyo Hitman Reborn has  chained in a jar after certain plot points.
 * Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The dead body of Fate Testarossa's older sister Alicia  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.
 * Naruto: Orochimaru's bases often have people in jars in them as experiments. A more recent one is, who is released by Sasuke to join him.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion: With, first encountered in one of the most Squick-inducing scenes in the entire series.
 * It's implied
 * "Implied"? In the manga, we see the original in a jar.
 * Outlaw Star: Spaceship Girl Melfina, climbed into a tank naked to provide special navigation.
 * Scrapped PrincessLord Renard 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.
 * Tales of Symphonia OVA: The Asgard ranch had these.
 * Tenchi Muyo OAV: Ryoko ends up put in one of these via Big Bad Kagato.
 * 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 Techno Babble 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.
 * To Aru Majutsu no 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,
 * Turn a Gundam: Several Moonrace people are kept in jars and in suspended animation. IIRC, two of them are
 * 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  Did I mention that 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.
 * Yu Yu Hakusho: After being cut in half, Hiei is put in a tank to heal.

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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Abe Sapien's origin story was that he was found by workers underneath a hospital in Washington DC, floating in a suspended animation tank with a note that had the date of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and the word icthyos sapien.
 * In Scott Pilgrim, Ramona's 7th evil ex,  has some sort of big spaceship thing, in which

Fan Fic

 * Tamers Forever Series: In There's
 * Rise of the Galeforces, naturally, showcases cloned Supers from the Golden Era in these, particularly in the first two parts.

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 100% perfect."
 * Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite could be seen as a variation of the trope.
 * 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 Fifth Element reconstructed the rest of Leeloo around her hand. Later, the heroes are shown recuperating in the said jar.
 * 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.
 * The exact same scene happened in the Manga Gunnm.
 * 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.
 * This actually was already in Cut Content of the first movie in the series.
 * The Spacing Guild navigators in Dune were essentially mutated ex-humans in jars.
 * Spoilerific movie example: The Prestige
 * 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 eponymous 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.
 * A version of this is used to store the humans being harvested for blood in Daybreakers

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.
 * 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'.
 * Used twice in the latest Matthew Reilly book "The Five Greatest Warriors".
 * The immortal emperor of the Hawkwind books by Michael Moorcock keeps himself in such a device. Even holding rare audiences from his tank.
 * In the third story from the Memoirs of a Space Traveller: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy by Stanislaw Lem, there's a creepy scientist, who keeps speciments obtained by cloning experiments in such a jars. For the most part they aren't humans, but
 * 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 gerkin in the jar".
 * 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.
 * In Robert Westall's Break of Dark short story Sergeant Nice, 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 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.

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.
 * In the Star Trek the Original Series episode "The Empath", Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find the bodies of two missing researchers encased in jars. Ominiously, they then discover three empty jars labelled with their names.
 * "Space Seed" shows Khan and his followers in cryogenic storage.
 * 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.
 * Also the prisons in Power Rangers Time Force.
 * 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.
 * Space Above and Beyond featured a number of scenes (mostly flashbacks) of InVitros in the tanks they were "bred" and developed to physical maturity in.
 * On Babylon 5, Lyta Alexander revealed that
 * And there were the Shadow-modified telepaths stored on the station, which are later used to
 * Kyle XY spends the first 16 years of his life in one of these,  That's about where the series starts up.
 * I Carly: Comedic version used for Stu Stimbler's kid in iStakeOut. "Watch me spank your daddy!"
 * In the Stargate Universe episode "Space", two crew members are rescued from these.
 * In the reboot of Battlestar Galactica
 * Brocktoon!
 * Given how experiments on humans, aliens and hybrids are common in The X Files, this happens every now and then.
 * Given how experiments on humans, aliens and hybrids are common in The X Files, this happens every now and then.

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."

Tabletop Games

 * Battle Tech's Clans prize members known as Trueborn 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.
 * Are we really to believe that there is a squicky trope that Warhammer 40000 hasn't turned up to eleven at some point? Of course not: 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.
 * Magic the Gathering features Ashnod's Transmogrant, which makes your creature slightly stronger...And turns them into an artifact, a.k.a. a machine.
 * GURPS Bio-Tech has stats for this item.

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, No wonder she jumped ship.
 * She and many fans.
 * Aquapets. Google it. How this toy made it into production in its original form is anyone's guess, but when someone finally asked "Does This Remind You of Anything?" a redesign was hastily commissioned.

Video Games
"Melchior: Hey! Stop staring at the naked girl in the tank!"
 * Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had a boss who captured Jedi and kept 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 games, injured persons recuperate in tanks of healing fluid, and prisoners are kept in cells of a similar design.
 * Xenosaga had mutants... in jars. Realians are literally test-tube babies in larger scale, although there is little evidence to suggest they ever go back in after their initial awakening.
 * Xenogears could arguably be based on this trope. 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.


 * Final Fantasy VI had espers... in jars.
 * Final Fantasy VII had Zack and Cloud stuck in tanks during their years of experimentation at the hands of Complete Monster and Mad Scientist Hojo.
 * Final Fantasy IX had the Genome, some of whom are seen in jars. They also have Uncanny Valley tendencies, but (since it's already canon that Zidane is male) they aren't clones, since they have sex.
 * To show just how evil Jon Irenicus is in Baldurs Gate: Shadows of Amn, 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 did 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.
 * 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 intrest, which he's been growing in an attempt to inspire any emotion in his soulless state. Safe to say, Irenicus loves his creepy glassware.
 * 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.
 * 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). It's rather creepy, even if it's mostly unexplained.
 * It is explained :
 * Chrono Cross has a scene where This scene was, of course, popular with the female fans.l
 * 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.
 * Earthbound 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. In one of the weirdest examples of No Ontological Inertia in videogame history, killing the boss 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.
 * Didn't killing the boss shut down the facility? One could assume they'd automatically release as a failsafe, incase any of their own workers got caught inside.
 * Mother 3: puts people and animals in tubes filled with a bizarre green fluid
 * EarthBound Zero also has people who have been kidnapped by aliens stuffed in tubes, making this a series-wide trope.
 * Weirdest of all, you can talk to them despite there not being air holes. In the first two games, they'll mostly just seem irritated with the whole circumstance. In the third game, their dialogue is chilling.
 * JC Denton finds a few people in tanks during the course of Deus Ex, along with the implication that.
 * In Beyond Good and Evil
 * Dead Space has some in the Ishimura's body part cloning farm.
 * 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 ) and incomplete Tarantulas (Cybernetic robot spiders 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.
 * 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,.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Fallout 3:
 * And the mutated creatures in vats at Raven Rock, some of which are never encountered anywhere else in the game, leave their purpose to speculation.
 * Played straight in The Glow from the original Fallout. The lower levels of the bombed out facility held about 100 human-sized or bigger jars, with logs dating the process of the Forced Evolutionary Virus. Most of the jars were broken, even in the parts of the facility that escaped the bombing...
 * CABAL from the Command and Conquer Tiberium series 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.
 * Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force had a level where it turned out that everyone "killed" on an alien ship were transported into People Jars to recuperate.
 * One of the enemy types in the final level of R-Type: Delta is a fetus in a crystal.
 * The capsuleers (read: players) 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.
 * 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.
 * Unreal II the Awakening features bits of people in jars, and buttons you can push to make them twitch...
 * Played literally and subverted rather humorously in Toejam and Earl in Panic on Funkotron, which involves capturing Earthlings by pelting them with jars until they've been trapped inside.
 * One of the fighters in the Capcom Humongous Mecha fighting game 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.
 * X-COM has people and cattle placed into jars and dissolved, so the aliens can inject the resulting nutrient solution.
 * The original Kingdom Hearts saw the Princesses kept in transparent crystal-like coffins in the topmost room of Hollow Bastion.
 * Mass Effect 2 has the Collectors, who abducted humans and placed 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 --.
 * Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter had headless clones of its Winged Humanoid Nina (in an inversion of the usual Breath of Fire "Nina trope", not a princess but a mutilated, genetically-engineered little girl who is legally considered an experimental animal)...IN JARS. Even worse, the plan was to use the headless Ninas in People Jars as essentially living air filters to remove the pollution accumulated by people living 1000 years underground in a Crapsack World.
 * A few rather creepy examples are encountered in Baldur's Gate 2
 * In Pokemon 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 even the scientists nearby are disturbed by the process.
 * Cyber Storm: Vats are used to grow, maintain and recycle bioderms while they're still alive. It's like an immoral, compact hospital.
 * The first generation of Starcraft had these things which you could put on custom maps. One hidden level used them to create Hybrids - the first viable example being a High Templar/Zergling.
 * 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.

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.
 * 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.

Web Comics

 * In the Girl Genius Steampunk/Gaslamp Fantasy 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 food/water and air). On the whole, the town population approved of his methods.
 * This page of Inhuman is a great illustration of People Jars.
 * Narbonic: The final arc has a group of hamsters plotting to  and trap them in jars to   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.
 * 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.
 * Homestuck has this.
 * The Girls in Space adventure "The Pickled Past" has alien people in jars.

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
"Dear Abby: My advice is to free us or let us die!"
 * Every single celebrity in Futurama
 * 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  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.
 * X-23 is one of those babies.
 * 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.
 * And Clinton implies this is a common occurence for him...
 * Another episode has them 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.


 * 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".
 * Invader Zim kept a number of abducted human children in jars for his various experiments. One of whom had the reoccurring gag that, because Zim had operated on the pleasure center of his brain, was completely and profoundly happy. All the time.
 * Not to mention that all Irkens are born this way. Giant tubes probably don't seem so horrific to them...
 * In a season six episode of American Dad, 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 where agents were chasing Roger but Stan removed the wig from the old woman and convinced the agents that she was the alien.)
 * One Bad Future in Phineas and Ferb