People Zoo

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

So if you come visit, just howl, honk, or moo
And try to pretend you’re an animal, too.
‘Cause if you’re a person, they’ll throw you into

Cage Two of the zoo here in Animaloo.
—Shel Silverstein, "The People Zoo"

Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a zoo created by some alien race or just a plain crazy person that puts live specimens of humans or other intelligent life on display. This is one of the more likely places you'll go if the Egomaniac Hunter doesn't kill you after the Most Dangerous Game.

Only related to Petting Zoo People, in if it's run by an intergalactic hunter it may be filled with them.

Could be called the slightly more civil version of People Farms.

Examples of People Zoo include:


Comic Books

Film

  • In the Disney movie Can Of Worms, a species of alien hunted and put on display one of every intelligent species. Ironically enough, they were not allowed to capture unintelligent species due to an intergalactic law.
  • In the film version of Mars Attacks!!, the Martians include a man in a clown costume (apparently they believe that clowns are animals) among the numerous specimens they have collected from Earth. They also capture a female newscaster and graft her head onto the body of her dog.
  • Another Disney film, Flight of the Navigator.

Literature

  • The book Planet of the Apes has a zoo with a display of people "in their natural habitat". The scientist of the group from Earth is in this display, and has regressed by the time we see him.
    • He had brain damage, and the apes had given him a lobotomy to save his life, not realizing that he had cognitive functions that would be damaged by such a crude operation.
  • The main character in Slaughterhouse-Five gets put into one of these (together with a porn star) by the Tralfamadorians.
  • In the Isaac Asimov story Breeds There A Man?, Earth is implied to be a laboratory experiment by aliens, with mental controls in place to prevent us from developing interstellar travel. Then humans evolve around the mental blocks ...
  • The first Time Machine short story by Donald Keith, "The Day We Explored the Future." A pair of Boy Scouts goes forward in time and is captured by a group of Future Boy Scouts. Their Scoutmaster plans to have them put in a "vivarium".

Live Action TV

Music Video

Video Games

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Occurred in the episode "A Zoo Out There" of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.
    • Interestingly, two of the aliens running the human zoo in Buzz Lightyear were voiced by Jonathan Harris and Billy Mumy of Lost in Space. A stealth Actor Allusion / Shout-Out?
  • "Operation: Z.O.O." from Codename: Kids Next Door has a zoo of kids.
    • And in another episode there was Bully Island, though the bullies didn't speak or really act human, more like dinosaurs.
  • "The Main Man" from Superman: The Animated Series involved an intergalactic collector that liked to acquire the last of any species in the entire universe. While he included beasts in his collection, he also ended up collecting Superman and Lobo as they were the last known Kryptonian and Czarnian, respectively. Of course that idea didn't end well for him.
  • Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Eye of the Beholder"
  • One of the couch gags in The Simpsons puts the titular family in one of these. Run by Kang and Kodos' species, of course.
  • Captain Planet featured an episode where an alien came to incorporate the Planeteers into a collection of doomed species from across the galaxy. Fitting with the series' theme, he thought mankind, treating the Earth as they were, were doomed to extinction.
  • The New Adventures of Superman episode "The Robot of Riga". Aliens kidnap Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and put them in a cage on their home planet Riga.
  • This was what Regular Show was going to be about before they re-tooled it.
  • Happens in an episode of Fairly Oddparents when Dark Laser put the Turner family in an intergalactic zoo for profit. Timmy's parents don't seem to mind much.

Real Life

  • The Denver Zoo did this once, presumably using volunteers working for charity on pledges. They got complaints from parents and animal rights groups alike.
  • Edinburgh Zoo once held a similar exhibition, using performance artists in an enclosure that used to have ducks in it.
  • In ancient Rome, this was just a normal day at the Colosseum.
  • A pygmy named Ota Benga was kept in the Bronx Zoo in 1906.
    • Many zoos in Europe had "authentic Negro villages" built in them during the 19th century. The people in them were usually at least nominally volunteer and were paid (poorly), but needless to say, it was a quite humiliating practice.
  • Ota Benga's career began at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Most World's Fairs between 1889 and 1939 included human displays of "inferior" (meaning non-white) people in their allegedly natural surroundings, as well as Renaissance-Faire style recreations of old-fashioned European towns. Other human exhibits included celebrities like Helen Keller and occasionally premature babies. Oddly, many of the participants were there willingly.
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