History Main / PopulationXAndCounting

* ''VideoGame/Wasteland2'': Next to the entrance to Rail Nomad Camp there is a sign stating the town's current population. How low it will get is directly tied with players' action - and even the best course of events will take out ''fifth'' of the starting population.

* ''Series/{{Goosebumps}}'': The ''Chillogy'' three-parter features the miniature town of Karlsville, which draws people into it through various means. Whenever this happens, the population sign automatically changes.

* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Zootopia}}'', the sign for Bunnyburrow (shown in the page image) has a ticker that [[ExplosiveBreeder never stops going up]]. The fandom has its fun with it, sometimes treating it as accurate for laughs, or more often as a tourist trap with only the lesser numbers counting up and resetting periodically.

* ''[[WesternAnimation/TexAveryMGMCartoons Dangerous Dan McFoo]]'' opens with a shot of the sign for Coldernell, Alaska, whose population sign decreases whenever a gunshot is heard.

* Smalltown, USA in ''Film/TheMuppets'' has a population sign which flips, seemingly by magic, to keep the population count accurate whenever the main characters enter or leave the town.

* In ''WesternAnimation/SouthParkBiggerLongerAndUncut'', at the beginning of "Hell Isn't Good", we see a sign for Heaven with the counter at only 2500, while a sign for Hell is in the millions and is rapidly increasing.

* Played with in ''Film/TheSpoilers'' (1942). A prospector in a gold rush town is told that a hotel doesn't have any vacancies. Suddenly there's a gunshot from inside the hotel and a body rolls down the stairs. The hotel owner promptly sells the now-vacant room.

* ''[[WesternAnimation/TexAveryMGMCartoons The Shooting of Dan McFoo]]'' opens with a shot of the sign for Coldernell, Alaska, whose population sign decreases whenever a gunshot is heard.

* The movie ''Oblivion'' (the 1994 BMovie, not the 2013 one) establishes its SpaceWestern credentials with a scene in which the bad guy moseys into town and adjusts the population sign to -1... with the blood of his latest victim.

* Played with in ''The Spoilers'' (1942). A prospector in a gold rush town is told that a hotel doesn't have any vacancies. Suddenly there's a gunshot from inside the hotel and a body rolls down the stairs. The hotel owner promptly sells the now-vacant room.

* Likewise inverted in Joan Hess's ''Maggody'' novels, in which the tiny Arkansas town's "Pop. 755" never ''does'' get updated, despite a multitude of murders and at least two births. Protagonist Arly Hanks facetiously argues that it's always accurate by ''somebody's'' definition: it depends on whether or not you count drifters, woods-dwelling weirdos, family pets, and livestock as part of the population.

* ''{{ComicBook/Rubine}}'': After discovering a murder in a small town that has one such sign, CowboyCop Rubine crosses off the last digit and replaces it with one smaller.

* Population signs in ''ComicBook/LuckyLuke'' are occasionally represented as using movable digits, like on a scoreboard (in those cases, the sign usually displays "Population today").