Their freedom comes at the cost of their collector's value.
"And yet, no matter how fleeting their existence, I welcome all... to a place in my carefully curated collection!"
— Trazyn the Infinite, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2
A character is going about their business until — what's this? Someone is trying to get them into a museum! And no, they're not trying to get them to visit the museum. They're trying to make them exhibits.
Maybe the character was mistaken for a caveman or something. Maybe they're the last of a rare species or race. Or maybe they're just being tortured for the heck of it. Either way, the result is the same: there's a living person behind a glass wall in a museum.
It's also possible for a character to make themselves a museum exhibit, generally by disguising themselves.
Such exhibits can be part of a Museum of the Strange and Unusual. Strongly related to The Freakshow and People Zoo. For its much darker relative, see Living Doll Collector.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Marvel Universe: This is the Collector's shtick. He gathers rare specimens of countless alien species for his private collection. He tried many times to include superheroes in his gallery, especially The Avengers.
Film — Live-Action
- At the start of Restoration (1995), Dr. Merival is shown a man with an exposed heart due to a chest injury. He later visits a room of scientific curios kept by the King, and is dumbfounded to see the same man sitting on a chair as one of the exhibits.
- Night at the Museum features exhibits that come to life at night.
Literature
- Chronicles of the Kencyrath. Prince Ozymardien is famous for collecting all kinds of valuable things, including the most beautiful virgin in the Eastern Lands as his wife (whom he apparently left untouched to maintain her value). When Jame breaks into Ozymardien's treasure trove, she sees what she assumes to be a life-sized sculpture of a woman reclining on a couch, until the woman rolls over in her sleep and Jame realises she's the virgin princess.
Well, why not, Jame found herself thinking wildly. She's part of the collection too, isn't she?
- Dan Shamble Zombie PI: In Death Warmed Over, the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh on display at a museum reanimates, and he's not too happy about being used as an exhibit. Eventually, a compromise is worked out in that the mummy is hired as a lecturer.
- In The Mote in God's Eye, the Moties take some of the visiting humans on a tour of one of their museums. In addition to replicating entire habitats, there's also a caste of non-sapient Moties. It turns out their purpose is a hint towards what the Moties are keeping secret as they are called Meats.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "The Space Museum", the TARDIS 'jumps a time track' and the Doctor and his companions find themselves in the eponymous museum and at some point in the future where they have become exhibits.
- One episode of Lois & Clark had two bored millionaires who planned to put Superman in their private collection of rare items.
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Most Toys" has a man kidnap Data with the intention of housing him in a private collection.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- One episode ends with an astronaut as the "human" exhibit of a zoo on a planet he's crash-landed on.
- Another features a department store with mannequins that come to life and go on vacation for a month at a time.
- Some of the artifacts in Warehouse 13 harbor the spirits of living beings, notably Lewis Carroll's mirror holding the spirit of Alice Liddell. The Bronze Section contains people trapped in aware suspended animation as punishment for past misdeeds.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000 gives us Trazyn the Infinite, a surprisingly gentlemanly Necron lord who has amassed a massive collection of rare artifacts and exhibits, many of which are in fact living beings that have been placed in stasis or converted into hard-light and meticulously posed in dioramas that recreate famous battles in galactic history. Exhibits that have proven particularly difficult to "collect" are often wide awake while in stasis.
Toys
- BIONICLE: The Archives in Onu-Metru is an underground museum built for the main purpose of preserving and studying all known Rahi species. It was mentioned that in a disk dueling incident, a Matoran was transformed by a Reconstitute at Random disk into something so grotesque that he nearly ended up on exhibition as a Rahi in the Archives.
- The bio of the Gogo's Crazy Bones character Artix, from the franchise's "Explorer" series, states that he visits museums and pretends to be a statue so that visitors will see him as an exhibit.
Video Games
- In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, H. T. Parnell's museum in Tarant is home to Gar, the world's smartest orc. He sold himself to Parnell as an indentured servant in exchange for Parnell saving his family from poverty, and works off the debt by performing as a "freakshow" exhibit, impressing visitors to the museum with his above average (by orc standards) knowledge.
- In Batman: Arkham City, the Penguin tries to set up a museum like this, with exhibition dioramas prepared for Batman, Bruce Wayne, Zsasz, The Joker, Harley Quinn and Mister Freeze. However, he only got as far as "acquiring" Mister Freeze, one member of the League of Assassins, and Harley's pet hyenas, which he had shot and stuffed. After Penguin's defeat, Batman puts him inside the Bruce Wayne diorama, where he remains for the rest of the game.
- The bonus episode of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 features the characters, both stock NPCs and named characters, on display. Looking at them will result in them slowly acting a scene from a movie, shooting them will kill them, and there's a button that will cause all the characters in a room to agro against the player.
- Some characters in the anthromorphised-warship game KanColle form an odd variation on this trope, in that the characters in question are no mere exhibit but the actual museum itself. Some of the characters in question are more upfront about their museum-ship status than others; while Iowa only does so in (official) supplemental materials, Intrepid's in-game lines frequently bring up her status as a Sea, Air, and Space Museum, while Drum repeatedly shills her own museum and invites the player Admiral to come visit.
Western Animation
- Purno de Purno had an episode where Purno and his friends visited a museum showcasing various kinds of humans. One of them gets away, leading Purno and the gang to a prehistoric Lost World where cavemen put them in a museum as exhibits.
- Played with in the Regular Show episode "The Night Owl". Mordecai, Rigby, Muscle Man, and High Five Ghost are all frozen in liquid nitrogen for a few thousand years by an evil radio DJ, who has a convoluted plan to build a museum exhibit around them so that he can become rich and powerful. But eventually, all four of them are unfrozen and try to escape via Time Machine.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Atlantis Squarepantis" ended with Plankton being shown as an exhibit in the Atlanteans' museum to replace the World's Oldest Bubble, which SpongeBob and Patrick had accidentally popped earlier.
- Superman: The Animated Series: In the episode "The Main Man", an alien known as the Preserver keeps endangered aliens in his zoo, and he hires Lobo to capture Superman. The Preserver also betrays Lobo, since he knew all along that he is also endangered (by his own volition), but the two escape and defeat him. Superman takes his zoo and places it in the Fortress of Solitude.
- In the What A Cartoon! Show episode "Stranger Things", a clumsy robot plays with "the most dangerous thing on earth" (a Banana Peel). When he superiors see all the damage he had done over the course of the film, they declare him the new most dangerous weapon and put him on display.
- World of Tomorrow has this happen to the clone of a man named David. The clone was kept in captivity so the public could see how he lived and how close he was to natural born humans. He spent his entire life in the exhibit, and when he died, more clones were made from his genetic data.
