Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
We got BIG trouble![1]

Because "Attack of the 15.24 Meter Whatever" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

This is like Incredible Shrinking Man, except that the ray gun that zapped the character was set on "Grow" instead of "Shrink". Now the protagonists have a huge problem to deal with.

For maximum disaster potential, the victim of the growth is usually a pet, wild animal, baby human or other character without a firmly developed sense of morality or sentience who might innocently topple skyscrapers without really meaning it. If the victim is a normal person, instead the process will inevitably fry their synapses, or they'll go on a power trip with delusions of Godhood. Either way, the hero of the story has to find a way to put them back to normal.

This generally violates the Square-Cube Law, but that's okay. For humans, expect Magic Pants to be in effect—can't have a giant *naked* person, after all. The Moral Guardians would freak. For non-humans, expect the odds of the critter being a Slurpasaur to go up as the budget comes down.

Differs from Shapeshifting in that the character generally just becomes a much bigger version of whatever they were before. Pet monkeys and lizards, however, tend to seamlessly morph into either King Kong or Godzilla knock-offs along the way, no matter what their original species were. (And if that happens, expect two or more Japanese tourists to shout "Ahh! Gojira!" and run away.)

Episodes of this kind are quite likely to include a Stock Parody or Homage of King Kong: The 50-foot whatever will climb a tower, often with a Damsel in Distress in hand and airplanes buzzing like flies. Imitators often omit the Downer Ending where King Kong falls to his death, though.

If the hero wants to fight back, he may be in for a Colossus Climb, if deploying Humongous Mecha is out of the question. Counterattacking from the air is another option, but risks invoking Helicopter Flyswatter.

A standard plot for animated shows, but tough to pull off seriously for live action. BMovies latched on to this trope for a time. After all, why settle for the standard-size Monster of the Week when you could have a giant one? Overuse, combined with the aforementioned effects problems, led to this becoming a Discredited Trope for serious live-action.

See also:

Examples of Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever include:

Advertising

  • Recently[when?] CFL (a British sofa company) have parodied this trope to extremes in their adverts with a Giantess.
  • A commercial for Pepto-Bismol had various kaiju and a 50-Foot Woman doing the "nausea, heartburn, indigestion" dance. Do we really want to consider the implications of giant beings with diarrhea?
  • Lee's Dungarees in their "Don't flinch" campaign had the "90-foot-Babe" Natalia Adarvez walking through a city, stepping on a Taxi, ripping power lines, towards a high-rise (or so it seems for the normal-sized peeps) where she picks out the window of a nice young man (the size of her finger) and gives him her phone number. Written on a billboard. With a broom. He, wearing Lee's Dungarees of course, doesn't flinch.
  • This commercial for Monster Floorfillers. Those with a foot fetish will also be very interested in it.
  • This American poster from World War I. Fridge Horror comes into play if you realise that the imagery is taken directly from the sinking of the Luisitania.
  • Inverted in some DirecTV ads circa 2012, in which the multi-zillionaire spokesman has a pet giraffe less than 2' tall.

Anime and Manga

  • Though not all measure up to Fifty feet, the Awakened Beings of Claymore are all fairly massive, the smallest standing at least 18–20 feet.
  • One episode of Mon Colle Knights is specifically titled "Attack of the 50-Foot Lovestar" (for the dub anyway), and has the normally fist-sized Lovestar grow huge after drinking some water near a farming village.
  • In an episode of Flint the Time Detective, a Time Shifter causes Sara to grow to giant size.
  • Episode 3 of the OAV Armored Troopers J-Pheonix PF Lips Team features a giant android girl named Kokoro chained to a cave wall. Needless to say, this episode focuses on two of the main characters helping to set her free.
    • Amusingly, this is the only known information we have about the show. At all.
  • Episode 30 of Keroro Gunsou introduced the Flash Spoon, a device that could make its user grow to enormous size. In the first half of episode 57, Keroro uses it to one-up Viper the Elder when the villain grows to giant size in a last-ditch effort at beating the Keroro Platoon. In the second half of the episode, a trip to the Nishizawa Group's private island (while waiting for the effects of the Flash Spoon on Keroro to wear off) results in a cuttlefish, a crab, and a turtle being turned into giant monsters by the spoon, while the rest of the cast also grows in an effort to stop them (except Dororo, who doesn't get his hands on the Flash Spoon until the batteries have run out).
    • The same thing happened in the dub, only it was called SpoonWow (made in Germany, you know the Germans always make good stuff).
  • Digimon is replete with examples of this, with several of the good guy and (quite literally) Big Bad title creatures taking on titanic proportions at one time or another.
  • Super Dimension Fortress Macross: The point of the Humongous Mecha is that the Earth forces knew the aliens coming to claim the SDF-1 would fall under this trope, and built them so they could fight them at their scale.
    • Of course, you don't really get the sense of scale until you see Breetai fighting against Rick and Max... while they're still in their Valkyries.
      • ... and he's still taller than them! Breetai was a big Zentran, though (if the average Zentran warrior's 30 ft. is equivalent to a 6' human, Breetai's easily 6'7" to 7' proportionally); most other Zentron and Maltron are as big or slightly smaller than a full Batroid-form Valkyrie.
  • Further to the above, in the second TV sequel to SDF Macross, Macross Frontier, the trope is gleefully subverted as the Zentraedi have become part of accepted human society... and many of them still spend most of their times as 10-meter-tall people. Who still do simple stuff like farming. A highlight is two of the main characters hanging out with a Zentraedi support character at a mixed-size mall... and in order to be at eye-level with her, the mains are on a third-story balcony.
    • Though this seems to be rare. Macross 7 had no full size Zentraedi other than Exedol, and the Zentraedi exclusive Macross 5 fleet had none either. Zentraedi living at full size is apparently so rare that even Mylene Jenius, half Zentraedi herself, had never met one and was shocked to do so.
      • There's also Mylene's sister Emilia, who must have macronised herself only recently, since she was not only born human-sized, but Mylene was surprised to see her at that size when they met up again.
      • Which makes sense since being probably dozens of times a normal humans mass they'd use dozens of times a normal humans resources in food, air, and space rather valuable commodities in a self contained environment like say... a space ship. (let's not even get into who thought 50 foot tall astronauts was a good idea to begin with...)
  • Many Mazinger Z Robeast could switch sizes (the first was Baikong 09). In an early episode, Dr. Hell built a size-changing ray and turned Baron Ashura in a giant with it.
  • A couple episodes of Pokémon had the cast encountering Pokémon the size of buildings. One time involved Ash's Treecko and a Gulpin becoming giant due to some Applied Phlebotinum. Another time involved an amusement park island with Pokémon-shaped automatons that were several times the natural size of the critters they emulated - and the cast was stuck ON the island for the duration of the episode.
    • Don't forget the giant tribal marked Alakazam and Gengar, and the giant similarly marked Jigglypuff Ash and Co. have to summon to sing them back into containment.
    • Then, of course, there's the episode where a Tentacruel grows to a huge size and destroys a city. Misty talks it down and convinces him and his goons back into the ocean. Later in the series, Tentacruel is shown to be, in reality, a fraction of the size.
  • Pretty much the plot for UG♥Ultimate Girls. Three High School girls grow to 100 foot stature, then fight the monster of the week. Lather, rinse, repeat. However, subverting the Magic Pants trope is the whole point of the show.
  • The anime of Cardcaptor Sakura featured this with (what else?) the Big Card, whose most malign effect was visited upon a cat (it seemed perfectly content at schoolbus-size.) However, the Big Card was needed in that same episode to fight the giant dragon, which Sakura's friend was describing in the book form of the Create card, and which was preparing to attack Toemeda. Sakura grew to giant size to fight the dragon, and, miraculously, no one noticed.
  • The first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha also had an episode where the adorable little kitten was enlarged into an adorable giant kitten by the collectible Plot Coupon. A previous episode had a cute puppy getting enlarged as well, though that one's giant form was less cute and more demonic-looking.
  • In Ranma ½, the forest of Ryugenzawa is home to a variety of exotic animals, such as koalas and platypuses, who have grown to titanic size (think "rabbits the size of grizzlies" and "flying squirrels the size of fighter jets") due to the magical properties of the Water of Life—itself a product of the magical moss that grows on the snout of the mountain-sized Yamata No Orochi.
  • In one damnation sequence from Jigoku Shoujo Mitsuganae, both Enma Ai and Kikuri are super-sized. They're mocking the victim's desire to be a "big shot".
  • Early on in Violinist of Hameln, the Demon King Drum assumes his true form—as a colossal, multiheaded dragon—and attacks the royal city of Sforzendo. At one point during the battle, Hamel proposes magically enlarging Flute so she engages Drum in a Kaiju battle, but is shot down immediately when they realize the equally-colossal upskirt view she'd give the whole city.
  • Chiri from Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei grows into a giant in one episode to fight an alien invasion in a parody of the Neon Genesis Evangelion movie. There's also a Giantess Panty Shot, but only because it was relevant to the episode's theme, of course.
  • In Naruto, the very first scene is of a giant Nine-Tailed Demon Fox attacking the Hidden Leaf Village then being magically sealed inside the title character. We are later introduced to the other 8 Bijuu demons, all of which are gigantic in their own right.
    • Summoning Jutsu allows you to call forth giant beasts to attack enemies on your behalf, providing you have a contract with them. The actual size varies both from species to species and creature to creature, from normal sized dogs to "Boss" Snakes, Toads and Slugs that tower over tall buildings.
    • One of the Akimichi clan's abilities is the ability to grow to an incredible height. It's firstly demonstrated by Chouji's father Chouza, who turns into a giant and stomps on enemy ninja, and then by Chouji himself in the fight against Jirobo where he becomes so huge, his body occupies an entire clearing.
    • The entire purpose of Pein's Animal Path is to invoke this trope.
  • Jungle de Ikou! ends with Mii turning into a giantess to stop Ongo from destroying the world.
  • Some of the Mushishi creatures-of-the-episode were quite large. The dying swamp comes to mind, in particular.
  • Mana Eimiya, the titular Super-Dreadnought Girl, stands at 49M and 46CM and fights alien monsters of comparable size.
  • Attack of the 50 foot Yutaka!
  • Mahou Sensei Negima? episode 20 has Evangeline turning giant. She's not aware of anything she's doing, and changes back at the end of the day.
  • Seto no Hanayome has this happen to Nagasumi, averting Magic Pants in the process.
  • The Ecchi comedy Colorful has this trope.
  • Mai-Otome essentially qualifies for this in the late episodes, when Nina Wong uses the Harmonium and grows into a several-hundred-foot-tall shadowy version of herself. The physical nature of the transformation/manifestation is debatable, but entire cities get crushed, hinting at plenty of mass.
  • Most of the Akuma in D.Gray-man are roughly human-sized, but when a ton of level 3s are combined, they turn into a skyscraper-sized black giant of death referred to as a level 3.5. Naturally, one of them wound up fighting General Tiedoll, who turned his Innocence into a wooden Mecha to fight it.
  • The first opening for Bakemonogatari features Hitagi as a giant whose footsteps can take up entire city intersections. This has just about nothing to do with her arc.
  • The End of Evangelion takes this trope to the Logical Extreme: Attack Of The 1200 KILOMETER Naked Girl!
  • One episode of Kimba the White Lion is titled "The Gigantic Grasshopper".
  • In one episode of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Stocking turns into a giant as a result of some magically fattening sweets.
  • Yaiba has the Orb of the Great Buddha, which can make him grow to gigantic size. At least once he grew so big that his head was out of Earth's Atmosphere. After few seconds he started choking and was forced to shrink back to a more manageable size.
  • This happened to Kankichi Ryotsu in one chapter and anime episode of Kochikame.
  • In Pokémon Golden Boys Gold encounters a giant Sudowoodo.
  • The final battle of Overman King Gainer features an Overman-sized Overdevil-controlled Gainer.
  • One of 007's abilities in Cyborg 009, though he only used it once when he and other cyborgs were under attack of cyborg animals.
  • In One Piece, this is the essence of Luffy's Gear3. Although he hasn't turned into a full-sized giant as of yet, he can expand parts of his body to the point of outclassing regular giants - who themselves measure at least 200 feet.
  • One of Keima's captured targets in The World God Only Knows grew enormous due to her desire to become "bigger" than a dojo leader.
  • Episode 4 of Oku-sama wa Mahou Shoujo features a giant teddy bear walking through the town. It's soon revealed that it was only a model of the town in Cruje's room.
  • Saiyans in Dragon Ball have the ability to turn into giant were-monkeys during the full moon if they have a tail. Piccolo and a one time villain from one of the movies, Slug, have also displayed the ability to make themselves grow to gigantic sizes.
  • In episode 10 of the 2017 Little Witch Academia, the "whatever" is a squirrel, which the Protagonist Atsuko "Akko" Kagari enlarges in order to sneak into a party, distracting the guards.

Comic Books

  • Has happened to nearly every major character in the DCU at least once during The Silver Age of Comic Books. Jimmy Olsen's transformation into Turtle-Man is perhaps the most ridiculous example.
  • A number of comic book characters have this as their special power.
    • On the Marvel Comics side, there's Giant-Man/Yellowjacket, Giant-Girl/Wasp (Marvel Adventures has her specifically as the former, the latter gains the ability much later), Hawkeye (who could do it as Goliath), Black Goliath (who died in Civil War), Atlas of the Thunderbolts, and Stature of the Young Avengers, amongst others.
    • On the DC Comics side, there's Atom Smasher (formerly of the JSA), the villainess Giganta, and Apache Chief from Superfriends, later reimagined as Longshadow on Justice League.
      • DC also has Elasti-Girl of the Doom Patrol who has straight growth (and shrinking) as her power as opposed to the Rubber Man powers her name would normally suggest.
      • Also from DC, the Legion of Super-Heroes has Colossal Boy. (In the latest reboot of the series, he insists he should be called "Micro Lad", as he's naturally 50 feet tall and has shrinking powers.) A previous version of the Legion had Shrinking Violet gain growth powers and call herself "Leviathan".
      • One of Superman's Silver Age enemies was Titano the Super Ape, a giant gorilla with Kryptonite vision. Also, the previously-mentioned Jimmy Olsen, Giant Turtle Boy.
  • In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight comics, Dawn is turned into a giant, presumably as an effect of losing her virginity to a "thricewise" but actually due to cheating on the thricewise with his roommate, so he cursed her in retribution.
  • An issue of Ambush Bug features a giant koala.
  • One issue of Spider-Girl, in a clear parody of the whole thing, has a cover with the heroine, grown to ridiculous size, with her parents in the foreground throwing out lines that would have been on any Silver Age Superman cover: "She may be a 50 foot monster, but she's still our daughter! In the actual issue, this turned out to be part of a Lotus Eater Machine a villain stuffed her into.
  • An issue of Lobo combined this with Marshmallow Hell.
  • Used hilariously in an issue of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, in Mary Jane's dream.
  • AC Comics, in general, has nearly half of its female characters able to turn into giantesses. This is explicitly Fetish Fuel; their first giantess character was so popular that they ran with it.
  • Titan of Justice Machine.
  • Dr. Manhattan can boost his size to become bigger. Much bigger.
  • The National Lampoon did a comic-book parody of the genre called "Attack of the Sizeable Beasts", where a well-intentioned scientist's growth-hormone test animals get loose. Not monstrously big, just...bigger than normal. A really large raccoon falls out of a tree and dents a car, a remarkably large bird flies off with a baby's sweater, that sort of thing. They don't wreak havoc so much as a low level of annoyance.
  • One Calvin and Hobbes strip has Calvin imagining he drinks a magic elixir and grows to over 300 feet. He proceeds to rampage through an imaginary town. His mum is not amused when Calvin asks for replacements for the toy cars that were lost in the rampage.
    • One story arc had Calvin imagining he grows so large that he outgrows the earth.
  • The first Simpsons Comics book involved Homer being on the receiving end of one of Mr. Burns' experimental growth rays. He ended up rampaging through Springfield until a dose of an experimental formula returned him to normal.
  • In "Bio Apocalypse" we have the fetus monster (in this case, 50 miles tall). May also qualify as an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Captain America foe the Ameridroid, a 20-foot tall Killer Robot that looks exactly like Captain America, possessed by the mind of a Nazi scientist.

Fan Works

  • One Digimon Tamers fanfic, poking fun at all the references other fanfics make to Digimon games and anime, took this, Revenge of the Sequel, and Colon Cancer Up to Eleven with the game-within-a-show-within-a-fic Digimon Explorers: Heroes Of The Space Time Continuum, Part Sixteen: The Brave New Digital World: The Attack of The Seventy Foot Kunemon From Beyond The Stars. Some members of fanfiction dot net are trying to turn this into Memetic Mutation, but it's not catching on since no one can remember the entire name. Some other members of FF dot net are thinking about writing DE:HOTSTC:TBNDW:TAOFTSFKFBTS because this trope can (and does) get played for Rule of Funny a lot in the Digimon fandom.
  • Attack of the 100 Foot Meg Griffin. The title says it all.
  • In With Strings Attached, the four are at one point shrunk to six inches high. George transforms himself to normal height (unfortunately, his clothing doesn't, no Magic Pants for him), which makes him seem like he's grown to about 400 feet high in relation to the others. Whether he can really grow that tall remains to be seen.
  • One Harry Potter fanfic set in a reality where a wizard's "coming of age" had a tiny chance of changing them into a magical creature featured Hermione turning into a giantess. Needless to say, sexual frustration abounded.

Film

  • Trope gets its name from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a 1958 B-Movie about a wealthy socialite who has a close encounter with a giant alien, grows to the titular height, and has her revenge on her philandering husband. Known for its not-so-special effects and famous poster, it has become a cult classic. Remade as a Made for TV Movie for HBO starring Daryl Hannah. The original was also an excellent source of Fetish Fuel.
    • Interestingly, the famous poster used as the page image actually depicts the woman as around 200 feet tall. I guess she just wasn't big enough for the poster artist?
    • Attack of the 60-foot Centerfold. Need I say more?
    • Roger Corman's Attack of the 50ft Cheerleader, from 2012.
    • Lucky Star has a Shout-Out to this in the form of Covert Pervert Hiyori fantasizing Minami and Yutaka as Schoolgirl Lesbians, one of the fantasies being a 50-foot Yutaka posing just like the original.
  • Giant monsters were the stock in trade of director Bert I. Gordon, better known as Mr. B.I.G. (note the initials). He directed many of the 1950s radioactive monster movies, including The Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider, and Beginning of the End (about giant grasshoppers). In the 1970s he did two more films in this vein, Empire of the Ants and The Food of the Gods very loosely based on works by H. G. Wells.
    • The Amazing Colossal Man (mentioned above) might just as well be called Attack of the 60-Foot Man, and it came out in 1957, the year before the trope-namer.
  • An entertaining example comes from the climax of Ghostbusters, when Big Bad Gozer makes the Busters choose a form for the monster it will summon to destroy New York City. While the other Ghostbusters try to empty their minds, Ray tries to think of the most harmless thing he can imagine: the mascot for Stay-Puft Marshmallows. Which results in a giant, grinning, sailor-hat wearing humanoid monster made of marshmallows stomping through Manhattan.
  • In Honey, I Blew Up The Kid, Wayne Szalinski's 2 year old son Adam gets hit with a growth ray. The more electrical appliances that the little guy gets exposed to, the bigger he gets. Near the end of the movie, Adam goes to Las Vegas and gets even bigger, and at one point, two Japanese tourists briefly appear:

Female Japanese tourist: Gojira!
Male Japanese tourist: No!... Big baby!

  • The classic sci-fi film Village of the Giants, from the aforementioned Bert I. Gordon, features an entire gang of delinquent teenagers becoming giants. They then take over the small town ... and dance a lot. (Interestingly, does not feature Magic Pants for the growing characters.)
  • The little-remembered Japanese monster movie from the makers of Godzilla, Frankenstein Conquers the World, featured a child who survives the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, finds and eats the irradiated heart of Frankenstein's monster, and turns into a giant wild-man who fights a giant lizard-beast. Whew.
    • The Japanese version climaxes in a fight with a Giant Octopus From Nowhere.
      • That was actually an ending filmed for the American version, but it wasn't used. Both versions end with Franken-boy and Baragon falling into the earth.
  • In Dude, Where's My Car? the alien Amazon Brigade morphs together into one "Super Hot Giant Alien" that goes after the main characters.
  • Most recently seen in Cloverfield, which featured a monster that can only be described as a 400-foot whatever. Seriously, look at the thing!.
    • A persistent, though extremely inaccurate, fan theory says that another way to describe it would be " Cthulhu".
  • Night of the Lepus features Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits. It is not intended as a comedy.
    • It is, however, inspired by the Australian satire The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon. In that novel though the (ordinary-sized) rabbits are infected with a highly-toxic (to humans) strain of myxomatosis.
  • In Monsters vs. Aliens, the leading woman is turned into a 50-foot (well, 49-foot-11½-inch) woman by being doused with Quantonium. Naturally...
  • Arachnid was about a bunch of people on a tropical island getting attacked by a giant spider from outer space and all it's mutant babies. It spawned giant centipedes, giant ticks, another spider, and at the very end, what looked like a grasshopper.
  • It's worth mentioning that while most of the tomatoes in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes were smaller than people, they were very large for tomatoes. (One human-stomper-sized tomato did appear at the climax.) It's worth mentioning so I can bring up this line:

Scientist examining giant tomato: "Gentlemen, it's worse than we thought. This, God help us, is a cherry tomato."

  • Q – The Winged Serpent. Giant snake-bird thing that may be an ancient Aztec god terrorizes New York City.
  • Godzilla. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
  • In the original ending of Little Shop of Horrors, The Mean Green Mother Her(Him?)self turns into a giant monstrous plant and takes over the world.
  • Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas has Eris, Goddess of Chaos. She's a little different in that she intentionally switches between being normal size and 50 foot size with no problem. It seems to mostly be for the sake of intimidation and just because she can, as she favors manipulating people and sending the occasional minion over stomping on random things herself.
  • In the classic '50s monster movie Them, the US Army learns what's worse than a single giant radioactive ant: An entire hive of them. This movie came out in 1954, before giant monsters were commonly used in movies. The first half of this movie is played like a detective story, then you get one heck of a Genre Shift.
  • Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, dear god. Z grade disaster flick where a Mega Shark and a Giant Octopus get unfrozen by Hollywood Global Warming, has scenes of the Octopus sinking an offshore oil refinery, the Mega Shark biting a section out of the Golden Gate Bridge, and best of all, the Mega Shark jumping god knows how far into the air to bite a 747 in half.
  • Alligator featured a pet baby alligator flushed down a sewer where it grows to massive dimensions eating test animals illegally dumped by a chemical company. Well-done comic horror, and written by John Sayles, yet.
  • You must acknowledge CROKER!!! or he will eat your head!
  • In Shorts, Stacey is holding the wishing rock when she wishes her boyfriend would grow up. Guess what happens.
  • A Shout-Out in Planet 51 as there's a manual about how to handle yourself when a giant woman attacks with a picture similar to the poster above on its cover.
  • The main characters in Shrek 2 bake a giant gingerbread man named Mongo to lay siege to the castle.
  • And in the Shrek prequel Puss in Boots the Mother of All Gooses (well, one Golden Goose) rampages through a Spanish town.
  • In the Greek movie The Attack of the Giant Moussaka, Athens is attacked by a Moussaka accidentally rendered gigantic by a ray from an alien spaceship.
  • A sheepdog that accidentally drank an experimental formula eventually ended up as a circus attraction in Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World.
  • Willie the Giant in the "Mickey and the Beanstalk" scene of Fun and Fancy Free.

Literature

  • Happens in the first book of Gulliver's Travels. To the Lilliputians, the protagonist is the fifty-foot whatever. Promptly inverted in the second book, when Gulliver washes ashore in Brobdinag, the land of the 50-foot everything.
  • Alice in Wonderland, wherein it is Portal cakes, tonics, and pieces of mushroom that cause Alice's vast changes in size - though these changes are irregular: when Alice first expands in the White Rabbit's house, she appears to be as normally proportioned as ever, but when she eats part of the Caterpillar's mushroom, her neck is described as having grown serpentine and winding compared to the rest of her.
  • The Dark Tower: It's a bear. A giant cyborg bear.
  • An early David Sedaris essay talks about trying to write erotica for a Giantess fetish magazine. He harbors no such fetish himself, he simply needs any job he can get. He ponders the more mundane aspects of being a giant that tends to get glossed over in such works. (How would they find enough food to eat? Wouldn't it be lonely? Wouldn't a bowel movement evacuate an entire city?)
  • When the movies in Moving Pictures break the barrier between reality and the Dungeon Dimensions, a giant copy of the lead actress, Ginger, steps out from the screen. She soon grabs the Librarian (an Orangutan) and climbs to the top of The Tower of Art, thus simultaneously parodying King Kong and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman at once.
  • An interesting inversion of the "army battles giant monster" is the Stephen King short story "Battleground", where a hitman finds himself battling toy soldiers that have come to life. This is specially brought across in the short film adaptation, where we often see things from the POV of the toys.
  • Funnelweb by Richard Ryan has giant mutant funnelweb spiders rampaging across Australia.
  • The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, by H. G. Wells, is about a substance called Herakleophorbia IV that causes whatever consumes it to continue growing throughout its life cycle. Soon giant insects, animals, and plants abound, causing no end of trouble for the remaining normal-sized population. The novella ends on the eve of a war between the "Children of the Food" and the "Pygmies."
  • The Monster Blood series in Goosebumps... except the fourth one
  • In The Fairly OddParents storybook A Mighty Big Wish, Timmy wishes to be a giant so he can stand up to the school bully, but it proves to be more trouble than it is worth.
  • In Shadow Keep we have the Demon King Dal'Brad, described as being taller and heavier than a medium-sized medieval city.
  • Giants from The Prism Pentad are quite huge. The same goes from the Big Bad's current form, the Dragon. The Bigger Bad Rajaat push this even further and turn into a colossus made of thunder and clouds.
  • In the TSR Endless Quest book Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, if you chose to drink this unknown potion that said it'd make you "strong," then you got an ending where the main character turned into a giant.
  • On page 73 of the Canadian grade 9 French text book Sans Frontieres we see a movie poster for Zagora. The monster is just a Horned Lizard with wings badly photoshopped onto it.

Live Action TV

  • The climactic scene in almost every episode of Power Rangers, as well as almost every episode of almost every Super Sentai ever made. The villain uses some form of Applied Phlebotinum to make the monster grow which usually necessitates the use of a Humongous Mecha in order to take the monster down once and for all.
    • The final episode of Power Rangers Zeo had the Rangers actually grow as well as the villains.
      • Also inverted with the Zords.
  • Ultraman. Every episode. In fact, a fair fraction of Toku series involve something small growing to meet the height of something already quite large. Then they fight.
  • In The Goodies episode "Kitten Kong" Applied Phlebotinum transforms Twinkle the kitten into a monster that destroys London.
  • In almost every episode of Monster Warriors, the titular warriors would face a giant monster literally brought to life out of an old B-Grade movie.
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World not only featured dinosaurs but also giant-sized versions of normal creatures (such as bees) for no adequately explained reason.
  • 3-2-1 Contact subverts this trope but good with a very convincing explanation of why a giant insect ala Them is physically impossible.
  • The crew of Lexx fought enormous alien replicas of human women in two episodes.
  • Kamen Rider Arc is the largest Kamen Rider to date at 3.2m tall, without use of CGI!
    • Kamen Rider J is a heroic version of this trope, able to grow to building-size in order to fight Fog Mother
      • Doras gains this ability after merging with Fog Mother in the ZO/J Crossover movie.
    • Parodied in Kamen Rider Decade. When Momotaros appears via Final Form Ride, the camera took an angle that made it look like Momotaros had become giant. Decade quickly shattered that perception.
      • Played straight in Decade's first movie, All Riders vs. Dai-Shocker, with King Dark, J, and Jumbo Complete Decade.
  • A common type of movie featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000. Besides the Bert I. Gordon films above, there was The Giant Gila Monster, The Black Scorpion, The Crawling Eye, and many, many more.
  • In the "Killer Cars" sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus, the cars are eventually gotten rid of "by the miracle of atomic mutation"—that is, they're chased away by a giant cat.

Music

  • One of Neil Cicierega's early instrumentals (before he adopted the stage name Lemon Demon) is entitled "Attack of the 50 Foot Zebras".
  • The Tubes have a song titled "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman", a tribute of the movie of the same name.
  • "Attack of the 60 Foot Lesbian Octopus" by Does it Offend You, Yeah?
  • When a king tries to take her for his queen and take her away from her father and creator, the title Robot Girl of the Voltaire song "The Mechanical Girl" proceeds to grow to seven times her size before putting her flamethrowers and rocket launchers to work in destroying his entire kingdom.
  • Space's fifth album, Attack Of The Mutant 50-Foot Kebab.

Music Videos

  • The music video for "Miserable" has the band Lit playing as Pamela Anderson plays a giant version of her V.I.P. character Vallery Irons.
  • The music video for "Love Machine" by Morning Musume does this to Yaguchi Mari, who happened to be the shortest member of the group at the time. The video for "Kare to Issho ni Omise ga Shitai" also had this with one of the members fighting a Godzilla expy, apparently with The Power of Love.
  • Ayumi Hamasaki's video Sexy Little Things include a gigantic woman bursting through a wall, her head almost as tall as the wall itself.
  • The video for the Beastie Boys "Intergalactic" features a giant robot (piloted by three scientists played by the group members) battling a giant sea creature in Tokyo in a parody of kaiju films.
  • The music video for Lana Del Rey's cover of sublime's "Doin' Time" has her playing a giant woman getting revenge on a man.

Tabletop Games

  • The 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons has a supplement called the Epic Level Handbook. Aside from monsters that are tremendously powerful, a disproportionate number of the monsters are also tremendously big, such as the Flesh, Stone, and Iron Colossi (super-sized versions of the more common flesh, stone, and iron golems) and the devastation vermin (really big bugs). In Monster Manual II, there is also a template to take a tiny or smaller creature and make it bigger than a house.
    • Hence ... The Titanic Toad [dead link]!
    • In the older Spelljammer setting, there were Giant Space Hamsters—roughly the size of bears—bred from regular hamsters by Krynnish Tinker Gnomes. And then they bred some of them back to regular hamster size, creating Miniature Giant Space Hamsters, because Tinker Gnomes are weird. Famously, Boo of Baldur's Gate may or may not actually be a Miniature Giant Space Hamster.
      • And then we get into the really out there variations, like the Sabertooth Giant Space Hamster or the Flying Carnivorous Giant Space Hamster.
        • And the Firebreathing Phase Doppleganger Giant Space Hamster.
  • Magic: The Gathering has Giant Growth, one of the most commonly reprinted cards of the game. The world of Naya from Shards of Alara is home to enormous creatures known as "gargantuans", which are worshiped by the local elves and humans.
  • Warhammer 40,000 seems to have a fondness for using "battle tank" as a standard size for wildlife, and Tyranids revel in this trope with their heavier creatures, especially the Bio-Titans.
    • Warhammer Fantasy is currently[when?] going into this trend as well, giving each of the factions new big monsters. The crowning one was the Arachnork Spider, which was so large it's base dwarfs the Land Raider, the second largest tank in 40k, who was then followed by the Zombie Dragon and the horrifying batlike Terrorghast, which shares a base with it. Storm of Magic turned it Up to Eleven with a whole slew of new monsters and beasts that any wizard can call upon to fight for him/her.
  • This is the entire point of the collectible miniatures game Monsterpocalypse.
  • One of the Kiths available to Ogre characters in Changeling: The Lost gives you this as its special power. Depending on how powerful you are and how big you are already, you grow to anything from the size of a gorilla to bigger than an SUV. Coincidentally, this Kith is called the Gargantuan.
  • Exalted has some of its behemoths, and any Lunar with Emperor Ox Expansion. One character, Leviathan, has spent the past two millennia as an orca roughly the size of a small island.

Theme Parks

  • A new{when}} musical version of Creature from the Black Lagoon at Universal Studios Hollywood features an enormous puppet of the Gillman at the end, made his unnatural size by an accidental application of... ahem... male anatomy enhancers.
  • In The Simpsons Ride, also at Universal Studios, Maggie wanders into a nuclear reactor and later appears as a giant, serving as something of a Deus Ex Machina.

Toys

  • Bionicle' Rahi Nui is already about 50 feet tall in its standard form (and it also attacks). But it has the power to grow even larger. So large, in fact, that this has once caused its molecules to split, since it couldn't control its density.

Video Games

  • Late in the Japan-only PC-FX game Makeruna! Makendou Z, after our heroes are put to sleep by Honmayaner, Hikari dreams that she is a giantess fighting a three-headed dragon.
  • At the end of Sonic Adventure, after Dr. Eggman feeds it all seven Chaos Emeralds, Chaos becomes a 50-foot sea serpent that rises from a flood in Station Square.
    • Perfect Chaos doesn't just rise from the flood; it is the flood!
  • An important part of the story in Super Mario RPG involves a giant sword that destroyed the Star Road and crashed right into Bowser's Keep.
  • Knuckles Chaotix has Metal Sonic being transformed into a 50-foot monstrosity after being defeated the first time.
    • Throughout the game, there are also power-ups that either double or half a character's size, and allows that character more or less control respectively over his partner.
  • Zombies Ate My Neighbors features such bosses as giant babies, giant snakes, and two mad scientists who turn into giant red tarantulas.
    • The level with the giant ants. It's not a boss, but a level where the enemies are giant ants.
  • Almost every single boss in the entire Contra series is a 50-foot robot or alien.
  • In the classic arcade game Rampage, you play a human turned into a giant monster by an experiment gone wrong.
  • One scenario in Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan revolves around a Salaryman growing to gigantic height to fight a giant blue mouse that was attacking the city. The second Ouendan game had a giant cat called Nyaragon.
    • Said Nyaragon was based on the monster from a movie that was being made in Elite Beat Agents, Ouendan's sister series.
  • In Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the bosses are normal enemies made Giant Mook by the magic of Kamek (except for one battle that involved Yoshi and Baby Mario getting shrunk). In fact the final battle involved Kamek enlarging Baby Bowser to a size bigger than the castle they were in.
    • There's also New Super Mario Bros. and Super Paper Mario, where there are power ups that can make the player character grow as tall as the screen and tear through enemies and obstacles.
    • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has Bowser being super-charged on adrenaline and growing super giant in order to battle his hijacked castle, a giant robot coming out of nowhere, a train, and even Princess Peach's Castle (as remodeled by Fawful), preceded by Bowser being crushed by said buildings.
    • Come to think of it, wouldn't the Mario Brothers themselves be a small version of this? Give 'em a mushroom and they double in height.
    • Especially since the intro of the giant mushrooms.
  • In the Japanese PS2 game The Daibijin, the player must pilot a helicopter, and in one stage an airplane, against a bikini-clad woman who had been Brainwashed and turned into a giant by aliens. Seriously.
  • In Majora's Mask, the boss of Ikana Canyon is a set of [masked] humongous desert worms that fly. The most common way to fight them is to don the Giant Mask, which will increase your size to give you a fighting chance. (Or you could don the Fierce Deity Mask and get a laser-beam shooting sword.)
  • In Psychonauts, stepping into the mind of a giant lake monster transforms you into an enormous monster called Goggalor."
  • In Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, Flonne's angelic attacks from the first game are obviously unusable. Instead she gets to grow to giant size, wear a big patchy dinosaur costume, and breathe fire while prop planes with obvious strings fly overhead.One of the worst, yet probably the greatest, attack in the game.
  • In Shadow of the Colossus, there are several 50-foot whatever. Sixteen actually. And you attack them!. The two smallest ones are about the size of an elephant.
  • In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Jigglypuff's Final Smash, Puff Up, causes her to grow/inflate to such a size that it can push other characters off the stage. Most evident on small stages.
    • Bowser's equivalent Final Smash move involves turning into the dreaded Giga Bowser and wreaking havoc on everybody.
      • It should be noted that Giga Bowser is much larger in Melee than he is in Brawl, and can get Super-Mushroomed to a downright ridiculous size.
  • One stage of Parappa the Rapper 2 involves Parappa and an ant being repeatedly shrunk and then grown to enormous size.
  • The arcade rail shooter Let's Go Jungle! features hordes of giant critters as enemies. In addition to giant spiders, there's giant wasps, giant frogs, a giant mantis, and the final boss is a giant killer butterfly.
  • City of Heroes has the 'Giant Monster' enemy class for foes that fall under this trope. Most of them spawn in open areas and are specially coded so that characters of any level can deal substantial damage to them. Some like the Kraken, Eochai and Devouring Earth monsters are simply giant versions of regular Mooks, but there's also Lusca the gigantic octopus, Jack In Irons the giant... well, the giant, and one of the ultimate Big Bads of the game; Hamidon- a colossal single-celled organism that takes dozens of players and special tactics to defeat.
    • Don't forget Adamastor the giant zombie, and the Humongous Mecha piloted by U'kon'Grai, Rikti Master at Arms with a name that's one big in-joke.
  • Spore gives us Epic creatures, basically larger versions of creatures made by other players that start off at a large, but not ridiculously so size in the creature stage, but become downright massive in Civilization. In Space phase, you can use the "Supersizer" tool to enlarge creatures, basically turning the scenario into "Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever You Want"
  • Every single major world boss in the Bubble Bobble series: huge compared to the protagonists.
  • Kraid in Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission. He stands about two map squares tall and naturally towers over Samus. In both games, Kraid is the first major boss fight, and is shockingly weak in health, despite his size. He attacks by shooting his belly spikes and flinging his detachable claws at Samus.
    • Quadraxis from Metroid Prime 2 is downright HUGE; his head alone is a little bigger than Samus' gunship!
    • Prime 2 also has Chykka, Emperor Ing, and Amorbis
    • Then from Prime you have Thardus, Metroid Prime, Flaaghra, and the Omega Pirate.
    • Prime 3 has Mogenar, and AU 313. Safe to say that Metroid loves this trope.
  • Ratchet and Clank has had robot Clank turn into a Humongous Mecha, who gets to level the surrounding area. A later game in the series Size Matters features a lot of both this and Incredible Shrinking Man as part of it's plot.
  • In Total Rampage, you play a giant monster trying to terrorize a city. Very similar to it's arcade counterpart, Rampage, mentioned at the start of this folder.
  • In Command & Conquer Red Alert: Counter Strike, there is a secret campaign where you fight giant ants
  • And how can we forget the end of the second stage in Sly Cooper 3? By the power of rage, Carmelita starts growing. And yes, the Dating Catwoman protagonist Sly gets to solve the problem with a Carmelita Climb, as put by the game.

Bentley:You've always wanted to get closer to her. Can't get much closer than climbing up her boot laces!

  • The Matrix: The Path Of Neo at the end of the game, which corresponds with the end of Matrix Revolutions, two avatars of the Wachowskis themselves speak directly to the player and explain that, while the Martyr ending was OK for the movies and the story, it just wouldn't work that well for a videogame. So instead, all the smiths get together and grab various bits of destroyed junk and debris, as well as a giant pair or sunglasses from an ad, and for a GIANT smith.
  • Unintentionally subverted in Age of Mythology, as the Giants, Frost Giants, Fire Giants and Greek colossuses are only about two or three (four tops) times the size of the human figures.
    • Then you buy the expansion pack and watch and marvel as your enemies get goomba stomped by a giant birdman which took you an hour or so to build.
  • Destroy All Humans! 2 has a boss fight in Takoshima with Kojira.
    • Not to mention the final chapter of the first game was called Attack of the 50 Foot President in a reference to the 50s B Movie. And, funnily enough, you fight a fifty foot robo-president brain in a jar
  • In Drakengard, the canon Final Boss is fighting a giant Manah.
  • Kirby 64 The Crystal Shards downplays this. Rock + Rock turns Kirby into an oversized Mighty Glacier version of himself. Take Fridge Logic and the fact that Kirby's 8" tall, and you learned that the Rock + Rock Kirby is 1'04"! (50 ft would actually be 37.5 times as large as Rock + Rock Kirby)
  • An early level in 3D Lemmings is "Attack of the 50 foot Lemming"—your lemmings start on the giant lemming's head and make their way down to the feet. Unfortunately there's no attacking, just a level designed to look like a giant lemming.
  • World of Warcraft has a few monstrous foes. Vanilla has the Devilsaurs, various giants, and the Fire Lord Ragnaros. The Burning Crusade added Fel Reavers, Colossi (crystalline giants), and the one-eyed Gronn. Cataclysm is bringing in Whale Sharks and Neltharion himself, who is FREAKING HUGE!
    • In Wrath Of The Lich King, the Ulduar raid dungeon is a Titan city, and thus is made of this trope, by this trope, for this trope.
    • You also get to be this in one of the new dungeons (Throne of the Tides) for part of the last boss, where you have to drive away a gigantic squid from basically the equivalent of a water god's lair.
  • In Crush Crumble and Chomp, the player is one of these.
  • Referenced in Discworld II, where you see a movie poster advertising Attack of the 50-Foot Dwarf. Also, in the endgame, a 50-Foot Elf Queen comes out of the cinema screen and you have to defeat her.
  • The right parameters when spawning mobs in Star Trek Elite Force 2 will allow you to make Map sized lizards and borg collosi, among other things.
  • In Amea, a good number of the bosses are this. Special mention goes to Mish, who was only a small child last time he was seen.
  • Touhou Project:
    • Suika utilizes her control of density to grow herself really large and heavy for some of her attacks in Immaterial and Missing Power and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
    • The plot of Hisoutensoku boils down to three characters seeing an impossibly huge shadow of something and going off in pursuit of whatever it was (though only one of them successfully tracks down the cause of their respective shadow). The last boss fights of Cirno's and Meiling's scenarios do this to a doll and a catfish, respectively. In the latter case, the catfish starts off as merely huge and continues to grow each time it attacks. Sanae's scenario inverts this by making her last boss the shortest character in the game.
    • New Super Marisa Land does this for the final boss.
  • Asura's Wrath takes this to a RIDICULOUS level, as the final form of the first boss turns to the size of a planet and tries to CRUSH YOU TO DEATH WITH A FINGER THE SIZE OF TENNESSEE!
    • Probably the ultimate example of this in both Asura's Wrath and possibly all of gaming is Chakravartin, whose extension of his power is so big his basic projectiles are Planets and Small Stars, he throws entire suns at you later, and Galaxies are small in comparison to him. Basically, he's really, really big.
  • EarthBound has one area, the Lost Underworld, where everything is so huge that the characters' sprites shrink. This includes the enemies.
  • The Marvel vs. Capcom games feature a good number of these as bosses. Starting with Apocalypse in X-Men vs. Street Fighter and going all the way to eleven in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with Galactus HIMSELF as the boss.
  • Lordran in Dark Souls is littered with dangerous giant beasts, such as wolves, armored boars, and magic-shooting butterflies.
  • On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness starts with Penny Arcade's Gabe and Tycho chasing after this giant robot that flattened your character's house.
  • Monster Hunter is basically all about tackling large monsters that can easily fling you around like a ragdoll without proper preparation (as in being Crazy Prepared). Amongst the largest of the lot are Elder Dragons Lao Shan-Lung, which is basically a red Godzilla; Jhen Mohran, a sand-swimming cross between a crocodile and a living mountain, whose spine can be mined for rare ore; Ceadeus, a whale-like aquatic monstrosity; and topping the list is Raviente, a colossal tusked serpent as big as an island.
  • The final boss of Serious Sam: the First Encounter is Ugh Zan III, a giant four armed monster who is so big that Serious Sam only reaches up to his foot. Almost all of the second-to-last level is about outrunning him to the super weapon stored inside a pyramid because he's too damn big. And he's an actual enemy inside the level, not just an Advancing Wall of Doom (though he functions pretty much the same way).

Web Comics

Web Original

Western Animation

  • In a Robotboy episode, Robotboy flicks a switch and ends up growing as big as the moon.
  • In the Johnny Bravo cartoon "Jumbo Johnny", an overdose of protein shakes made Johnny fat, and enough of them eventually made him grow to a gigantic height.
  • Kim Possible, "Rufus vs. Commodore Puddles". Fifty-foot naked mole-rat against equally large French poodle, in combat at Area 51. The garrison there kept giant, truck-mounted dog whistles and bombers full of dog biscuits available for just that situation. "Full frontal assault by giant canine. That's a forty-one stroke five-S scenario."
  • The Woody Woodpecker short Woody the Giant Killer.
  • In the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987 series, exposure to a meteor from space turned April's Hollywood Nerd work-mate Irma into a giant in the episode "Attack of the 50 Foot Irma".
    • In the same show, Krang became giant using a "molecular amplification unit". The Turtles entered his body to disable the device, and return him to normal.
  • Futurama spoofed this in its What If episode, with Bender coming to earth as a 500-foot version of his regular self, and Dr. Zoidberg being supersized to battle him. (The spoof aspect comes when Zoidberg is seduced by power and begins destroying the city himself - "The Apollo theater! Boo me off the stage on Open Mike night, will you?!?")
    • This trope was also played straight in the episode Benderama, wherein a 50-foot nerd attacks New New York City.
  • Sheep in The Big City spoofed this with their "commercial" segments in between the story pieces. This sentence says it all: "Attack of the 50 Foot Creature", in other words, a monster made entirely of 50 human feet (known in Europe as "The Approximately 17 Meter Tall Creature That Happens To Be Made Entirely Of Feet Movie")
  • Happens to Jade in Jackie Chan Adventures as she tries to cast a spell to become older and instead becomes huge. Her destruction, however, is limited to a demolition zone as she battled a giant ogre conjured by the Big Bad. Also see Po Kong the Mountain Demon, who is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Tohru, in reference to this, becomes one briefly too.
  • As usual, Tex Avery played this trope to the hilt in King Size Canary, in which a bird, cat, dog, and mouse enlarge themselves by drinking Jumbo-Gro plant food. The cartoon ends with the cat and mouse standing over a basketball-sized Earth.
  • The Tick vs. Dinosaur Neil, in which a paleontologist in a dinosaur costume turns into the real thing after mistaking prehistoric genetic material for pasta salad.
    • A later episode had the series' Big Bad Chairface Chippendale using a pill to turn Neil back into a dinosaur on his wedding night.
  • Used as part of a plan by Mojo Jojo on The Powerpuff Girls. He made the girls grow, not himself.
    • Sedusa also turns huge in one episode.
    • The fish balloon that destroys Tokyo Townsville.
  • Parodied in one episode of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Piglet is depressed about being so small, so the others make him think he has grown by tying boxes on his feet and putting binoculars backwards in front of his eyes. In another episode, Tigger tells a scary story where a giant Pooh scours the land for honey.
  • Ultra-Pipi from the Invader Zim episode "Hamstergeddon". He even gets back ridge-plates and atomic breath after demolishing a nuclear power plant. And somehow a cybernetic foot. (Because it looks cool, I guess)
  • Don't forget Apache Chief from Superfriends. And Giganta, his arch-enemy. And, if you count the Justice League cartoon, Long Shadow from the Ultimen.
    • Also from Justice League Unlimited, Supergirl once fought a giant fire-breathing turtle creature in Japan. (Its shock of red hair and the way it shrunk when defeated means it might have been a Shout-Out to Jimmy Olsen's Silver Age stint as "Giant Turtle Boy" as well as Bowser and/or Gamera.)
    • Also from Superfriends is the episode "The Giants of Doom". Guess what happens to Bizarro, Sinestro, Captain Cold, and Toyman in that one.
  • The Simpsons had Homer turn into a gigantic, carnivorous blob as part of one Halloween episode. In the same episode, we see a 50-foot Lenny bemoaning the fact that everyone's paying attention to Homer - except, of course, for Invisible Carl.
    • Before that it was done in a Treehouse Of Horror comic titled Sideshow Blob; Sideshow Bob become a rampaging blob monster after being injected with a serum.
    • And their other Halloween ep, Attack of the 50 Foot Eyesores, with local advertising icons run amuck.
  • One episode of the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog had Tails grow to Godzilla-like proportions and eat anything that he found edible nonstop. Unfortunately for the locals, they were all walking, talking wieners.
  • An episode of Biker Mice From Mars featured two monsters named Gorgonzola and Monsterella. The two of them could grow to giant size by blowing themselves up like balloons.
    • Also it's intro sequence had Limburger appear gigantic near the middle.
  • Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers:
    • In "Fake Me to Your Leader", Professor Nimnul fakes an alien invasion by enlarging insects to around twice the size of a human. Little does he know until near the end of the episode that he also accidentally zapped Zipper with his Gigantico Gun, resulting in the smallest Rescue Ranger becoming a giant who ends up stopping him. The other Rangers manage to get the gun, set it to reverse, and shrink Zipper back to his normal size.
    • Also used for a couple of brief scenes in "Puffed Rangers". The villains unwittingly enlarge the Rangers, who then end up scaring them off. Monty gets to have a bit of fun before returning to normal size.
  • Men in Black: The Series had the humans enormous compared to a race of tiny aliens trying some nefarious plot to become large. One alien actually did, but became a 50-foot whatever; requiring the MIB to deploy their own 50-foot whatever as well.
  • In the South Park two-part episode "Pan-demic", the world is under attack by giant guinea pigs. Giant live-action guinea pigs. They are joined by guinea bees, guinea rats, and other guinea creatures (which are just guinea pigs in costumes).
    • Mecha-Streisanduh!
    • And Trapper-Keeper Cartman.
    • And most recently Cthulhu.
  • Subverted in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command with giant extremists of the planet (ironically named) Gargantua. The subversion comes through the fact that the natural height of a Gargantuan is six inches and the 6 foot terrorists are actually turning off the tech that the heroes are using to avoid this problem in their natural height (earlier, Booster was a little upset that his seat for a ceremony was a bank).
  • Seen in one The Batman episode where the nanobot enhanced Joker 2.0 learns to increase his size by changing objects into nanobots, becoming a giant and decides to destroy both the original Joker and the heroes, leaving the city free for him to ravage.
  • Duckman ate a combination of odd chemicals that caused him to grow whenever he got angry. Duckman being Duckman, by the end he was taller than a two-story house, and went to a deserted island so his anger wouldn't hurt himself or anyone else. While he was isolated, his depression shrank him to mouse size, but he had no frame of reference, so he couldn't tell.
  • Oberon in Gargoyles makes himself gigantic when trying to kidnap Alexander Xanatos.
  • There was an episode of Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! called "Attack of the 50-Foot Fleegle," featuring an animal called a fleegle that would grow in size when given candy.
  • In the Sushi Pack episode, "A Very Big Deal," Ikura is shot by a malfunctioning shrink ray and grows to enormous size, fulfilling his earlier wish to be bigger.
  • On Phineas and Ferb, Candace uses a growth potion the boys made in order to grow an extra two inches; it makes her gigantic instead. The episode was aptly called "Attack of the 50-Foot Sister".
  • Darkwing Duck spends the end of "Planet of the Capes" this way. So did the villain, until the ray they were using to grow was broken. When you start using astronomical phenomena as melee and thrown weapons, you've put on a little weight.
  • Waybig, from Ben 10: Alien Force is a good guy example. He's even called a Toku'star, after the tokusatsu genre. One episode had a Taking You with Me failsafe that created a giant monster designed to nuke the earth. It was activated by a Highbreed officer who didn't get the memo.
    • And then in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien Gwen has had her moment too, growing very large to intimidate Zombozo the second time she takes her Anodite form.
  • Davey Hacker uses a gadget to make himself gigantic in The Amazing Spiez episode "Operation The 50 Ft. Hacker." Megan winds up using the same gadget to make herself giant as well, but it eventually backfires and causes her to expand like a balloon.
    • There was also the Totally Spies! episode "Attack of the 50 Ft. Mandy".
  • A few Classic Disney Shorts, including Brave Little Tailor and Giantland.
  • The video for Gorillaz's "19/2000" features a 300-foot elk.
  • Jake in Adventure Time can change shape and size at will. Marceline the Vampire Queen does so as well, though she generally prefers quite monstrous forms for combat purposes...and freaking people out.
  • There are several SpongeBob SquarePants episodes which feature this trope. In one episode Squidward becomes a giant after getting sprayed with plant fertilizer, and in another episode SpongeBob inadvertently becomes a giant after shrinking everybody in Bikini Bottom.
  • Eileen from Word Girl increases in size if she does not get what she wants, and she even grew taller than a skyscraper in the episode "The Birthday Girl".
  • In the episode "The Faery Princess" of Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, the evil sorceress Lale Kale arrives in the land of little fairies and decided it's a perfect new kingdom of her to rule, so she seizes its king and to attempts to proclaim herself the new queen (however fails miserably).
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force: "Bigger than regular chicken? You mean...Mega-Ultra-Chicken? Ssssh! Is Legend!"
  • In the Pinky and The Brain episode "Tokyo Grows" Brain enlarges Pinky and himself so that Pinky can disguise himself as Gollyzilla (a parody of Godzilla) and Brain would defeat him in combat so he can be deemed a hero; things don't go as planned when the real Gollyzilla shows up.
  • Attack of the Giant Midget!!!, who's actually average height.
  • On Fish Hooks, Milo discovers a tank that makes fish bigger, and uses it to make himself stronger. He ends up overdoing it, stomping through the pet shop wearing a little sailor suit and hat.
  • Hefty Smurf does Attack Of The 50 Inch Whatever in The Smurfs episode "The Magnifying Mixture".
  • On Bonkers a mediocre clown goes around stealing the humor from Toons. Eventually all the humor gets absorbed by his toon sidekick, turning him into a giant who attacks the city with Slapstick.
  • Naturally occurring in Godzilla: The Series.
  • After exposure to a growth ray on Celebrity Deathmatch, Jessica Simpson took out 98 Degrees' Humongous Mecha.
  • Happened once in Trollz. Dragon vs. Fifty-Foot Kitty.
  • In The New Adventures of Superman episode "The Chimp Who Made It Big", the chimpanzee Toto mutates into the giant ape Titano after being exposed to the radiation released in a collision between a kryptonite meteor and a uranium asteroid.
  • In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Secret of My Excess", Spike undergoes an abnormal growth spurt when he gets greedy on his birthday and his draconic "hoard-building" instincts kick into overdrive. He ends up the size of a full-grown dragon before finally being brought back to normal.
  • One episode of Rocko's Modern Life had Rocko's tooth mutate into a giant monster.
    • In another episode, Rocko wishes he were bigger, then dreams that he's become so big he bumps his head on the sun.
  • In Muppet Babies, the gang are pretending to have a magic lamp and take turns making wishes. Gonzo wishes he had a "great, big kiss from Piggy", but what he gets is a kiss from a great, big Piggy.
    • On an earlier episode, Piggy is a giant dough monster attacking a city. Bunsen tries to stop her with his Beast Blaster, but Beaker gives him a yeast blaster by mistake, which makes her bigger still. They make Gonzo bigger to stop her, but the two just end up falling in love.
  • Ursula grows to giant size after she steals Triton's trident in The Little Mermaid.

Other Media

  1. Clockwise from top left: Representation of an attack by a giant beetle; poster for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman; Bender and Zoidberg from Futurama; a parody image from Cracked; scene from Honey, I Blew Up the Kid