Amphibian at Large

We are toadally screwed.

Frogs, toads and other amphibians come in a range of sizes, but are mostly tiny. The largest species are about fist-sized. In fiction, on the other hand, they tend to be scaled up. This can range from dog-sized to building-crushing — a perfect storm of threatening and disgusting. They could also be Bewitched Amphibians who keep their human size when turned into frogs.

Frequently overlaps with Amphibian Assault, but not always. Some toads just wanna hang out and chill. This trope naturally crosses over into Kaiju territory as well, and indeed, more than a few giant monsters featured in media are partially or fully based on amphibians.

Compare Frog Men for specific humanoid examples. Also compare Mega Neko, Giant Spider, Rodents of Unusual Size, and Big Creepy-Crawlies for other giant animal tropes.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Naruto: The toads of Mount Myoboku can be summoned with jutsu. They come in a range of different sizes, including some gargantuan ones. Hanzo meanwhile can summon a gigantic salamander instead.
• One Piece:
  • The Water-7 Arc introduces Yokozuna, a giant bullfrog that is first seen trying to sumo wrestle a train. He's certainly larger than the normal person, and he's strong enough to stop a giant metal ball with his bare flippers.
  • Mad Scientist Ceasar Clown somehow managed to pass the powers of the Sala Sala Fruit Model: Axolotl to a enormous mass of toxic gas turned semiliquid, resulting in Smiley, a colossal Blob Monster who can transform into a truly gigantic salamander.

Art

• The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs include three labyrinthodon recreated as giant frogs. Although it's now believed they resemble giant salamanders built like crocodiles rather than frogs.

Comic Books

• Aquaman: Lagoon Boy is an amphibian humanoid based on the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
• In an early Howard the Duck story, a man — presumably a Mad Scientist — drinks a potion which turns him into the enormous Garko, the Man-Frog. It's apparently an unstable process, as he further changes into a regular frog and gets run over by a police car.
• Judge Dredd: In one story, Dredd visits an alien world where people are fed to a giant toad named Sagbelly, a creature roughly twenty feet high. The villain extracts a substance called oracle spice in exchange for feeding this monster.
• Ms. Marvel (2016): When Kamala learns that her friend Bruno, who's been crushing on her for as long as they've known each other, is now dating Mike Miller, she demands to know how they met. It turns out that it was in the middle of Kamala's superhero duties, where the two bonded while Ms. Marvel was battling an enormous frog.
• In The Quest for Kalevala, Don Rosa interprets The Kalevala's monster Iku-Turso as a giant amphibian◊. At the climax of the story, it goes on a rampage across Helsinki.
• Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom: While exploring an alien jungle and fending predators off, Superman and Supergirl run into a car-sized, brown-skinned amphibian, similar to the prehistoric Mastodonsaurus. Although it is definitely a meat-eater, Superman shoos it away easily.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Introduced in the 1987 cartoon, Mona Lisa is a human who was mutated into a humanoid salamander. She is usually depicted as a love interest for Raphael.
• Vampirella: Issue #5 of the "Feary Tales" arc has Vampirella in a darker version of The Princess and The Frog in which the frog is a large and monstrous creature that eats people. After the "princess" punches him out for asking to stay in her bed, he returns to human form and Vampirella kills him for his crimes.
• X-Men: Ch'od, a member of the Starjammers, is a large amphibian-like alien. His physiology allows him to survive both on land and in water and makes him a very fast swimmer.
• Zsazsa Zaturnnah has a giant frog that came out of a magic volcano.

Fan Works

• Prehistoric Park Reimagined: Several of the prehistoric amphibian species rescued are exactly as massive as they were in Real Life, with specific examples of said species including mastodonsaurus, proterogyrinus, and eryops (among others).
• Realistic Pokémon: Dragonite is shown as a gigantic winged salamander.

Film — Live Action

• Love And Monsters: One of the first monsters faced by the protagonist is a giant frog which attacks with its tongue to reel in prey.
• Pan's Labyrinth: One of Ophelia's tasks is to retrieve a key from the belly of a giant toad. Although it's not aggressive, it's large enough to scare her and gross her out. The fact that she has to make it vomit up the key is especially Squick-inducing.
• The Theatre Bizarre: "The Mother of Toads" ends with Mere Antoinette transforming into the eponymous Mother of toads: a human-sized bipedal toad.

Literature

• Cthulhu Mythos: One of the Great Old Ones is Tsathoggua, who resembles a giant furry toad with some bat and sloth traits. Compared to some of its kind, Tsathoggua isn't that dangerous and can actually be quite witty, though he has still been written as hostile and temperamental.
• The fifth Deltora Quest book, Dread Mountain, has the giant toad Gellick. It is a servant of the Shadow Lord and guardian of the emerald, which is lodged in his head.
• The Enchanted Files: As explained in Diary of a Mad Brownie/Cursed, toads in the Enchanted Realm are far larger than in the human world, big enough for a foot-tall brownie to ride on comfortably (size-wise, at least — the hopping is rather uncomfortable).
• Goblins in the Castle:
  • The goblin Prince Bindlepod, from "The Stinky Princess", has a frog companion who's big enough for he and Princess Violet to ride on comfortably.
  • Toad-in-a-Cage Castle is named for a giant stone toad in a cage in the Grand Hall. In Goblins on the Prowl, it gets brought to life, abducts William and takes off across the countryside with him, with its origin being revealed over the course of their adventure.
• KonoSuba has giant frogs as a recurring enemy. They fit the atmosphere well, as they are more comical than threatening, and their lack of teeth allows a Running Gag of them almost swallowing Aqua or Megumin before being messily killed.
• Moongobble and Me: Book 5 has Moongobble and co. visit the Temple of Toadliness, which is home to an enormous stone toad. When they make the mistake of angering the oldest toad present though, he makes it come to life and chase them away.
• Oddly Enough: In "In the Frog King's Court", main character Dennis has been examining the frogs in the local swamp, which are mutating due to chemical dumping, but even he's surprised when he sees one the size of a golden retriever — far bigger than any normal frog. He later discovers he can be turned into a giant man-sized frog, in order to deliver an important message to the man who's doing the dumping.
• Pyramids parodies the Biblical plague of frogs with the plague of frog, one giant frog who just kept everyone awake with his croaking into an air vent.
• In Scrapped Princess, Gloria is a Dragoon who manifests as a gigantic frog and chases Pacifica around until Zefiris disperses her form.

Live-Action TV

• Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger: One of the monsters Bandora sends after the Zyurangers is Dora Boogaranan, a man-sized toad monster whose primary method of attack is to swallow the Zyurangers whole.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers:
  • Season one episode "Power Ranger Punks" had a Monster of the Week named Terror Toad (who was actually adapted from the aforementioned Dora Boogaranan in Zyuranger), a man-sized toad who transformed two of the Rangers into spheres and consumed them, and then swallowed two others whole, requiring Kimberly to defeat him and save her friends.
  • The Frog Zord is Adam's new Ninja Zord in season three. Despite it's memetic status as the lamest of the Zords, it has a surprisingly versatile weapons system which includes lightning whips and flame throwers.
• Prehistoric Planet: The giant prehistoric toad Beelzebufo makes a brief appearance in Season 1, eating a baby Masiakasaurus that strays away from its mother. Season 2 has a sequence devoted to a male Beelzebufo attempting to call for a mate.
• Ultra Series has a few frog/toad kaiju.
  • Ultraman Taro had the kaiju Tondaile (whose Boss Subtitles are even Giant Frog Monster), which lived at the bottom of a large lake and ate people who got too close by trapping them inside of frogspawn-like capsules.
  • Black Garon from Ultraman Leo was a part-toad, part-turtle Flying Saucer Beast able to disguise itself as a small meteorite. Its main weapon was its Overly-Long Tongue that it could use as a whip.
  • One Monster of the Week in Ultraman Cosmos was Spittle, a frog-like kaiju with a flower-like frill around its neck that could enclose its head to form a protective cone.
  • Frogos from Ultraman Nexus is a giant fire-breathing amphibian Space Beast, although at 10 meters, it's actually on the smaller end of the scale for an Ultra kaiju.
• Walking with Dinosaurs features Koolasuchus, the last of a genus of giant amphibians known as Temnospondyls who were the dominant land animals until reptiles and stem mammals evolved, in their episode focussing on polar dinosaurs.

Mythology & Religion

• Tiddalik is a huge frog from Aboriginal Australian Myths who drank all the water in Australia, and only released the water when the other animals could make him laugh and open his mouth.
• The second plague in the Book of Exodus is usually translated as the plague of frogs, but some rabbinic interpretations hold that it was one giant frog, or an Asteroids Monster that kept splitting into more frogs every time the Egyptians hit it.^note This is due to a grammatic irregularity along the lines of "a plague of frog", in the singular.
• Jiraiya is a mythological figure from the Japanese Mythology folklore "Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya"; he is a ninja who can transform into a gigantic frog via shapeshifting powers. His tale inspired several figures in the Naruto series mentioned above.

Podcasts

• In Trials & Trebuchets, the minor villain Laud is a Slaad, a large, bipedal, toad-like monster.

Tabletop Games

• Parodied in the Discworld Roleplaying Game scenarion "Landscape With Quaint Features", which is centred around a sort of cut-price sunken R'lyeh in the form of a village at the bottom of a lake. The dread entity that was the object of the villagers' crazed cult has survived by being worshipped by the lake's frogs, but because this doesn't provide much belief, the powers he bestows on his amphibian followers includes making them very slightly larger.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Most editions have had large amphibians (such as giant frogs and toads) as fairly low-level monsters. Depending on said amphibians' size, halfling and gnome characters may be in danger of being Swallowed Whole.
  • The froghemoth is a Huge (literally giant-sized) bipedal amphibian with four tentacle-arms, three eyestalks, and yes, a 20-foot sticky tongue it can use to snap up and swallow even human-sized victims. Bullywugs tend to revere the things as gods and can communicate with them on a basic level, so froghemoths usually end up "adopted" by a bullywug tribe after eating only a few of them.
  • Dragonlance has amphi dragons, a True-Breeding Hybrid subspecies that inherited the worst parts of green dragons and sea dragons. They resemble enormous winged toads that can't actually fly, but are prodigious jumpers, can reel in prey with their tongues, change their hide's coloration to blend in with their surroundings, spray a line of acid for their Breath Weapon, and are covered in warts that ooze a corrosive acid that hurts those who strike them and corrodes their weapons.
  • Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia. The Melnibonean mythos has Quaolnargn, a huge (8 feet tall and wide) frog-like demon.
• Plague Toads from Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 are large, plague-filled toads that act as attack beasts for the armies of Nurgle. Some Plaguebearers manage to corral them as mounts, taking up the mantle of Pox Riders.

Video Games

• Altered Beast (2005): Due to the mutations by the Genome Mist, many toads and frogs grow to the size of (short) humans. One of the bosses, Sasquatch, is a much larger frog crossed with a gorilla with ice powers.
• Baal from Bayonetta 2 is a massive demon toad who Bayonetta can summon to kill angels by snaring them with her barbed Multipurpose Tongue.
• Blaster Master: The boss of Area 4 is a giant frog that attacks with its long tongue.
• In Cave Story, on the fourth encounter with him, Balrog gets transformed by Misery into a large frog who proceeds to attack the protagonist.
• Chronicles has creatures called Brogs. They are frog-like in appearance, and most of them tower over the average human. The smallest ones in the game still come up to your waist.
• Chrono Trigger: One of Frog's attacks drops a giant frog on the enemy, doing more damage the less HP he has.
• In Cuphead, Ribby and Croaks are large anthropomorphic frogs that tower over the main characters.
• Devil May Cry 4 has Bael and Dagon, two bosses fought by Nero in Mission 4 and Dante in Mission 15, respectively. They are large, toad-like demons each with two anglerfish-like glowing feelers called Rusalka that they can use to lure prey or to attack defend themselves.
• Donkey Kong Country gives us Winky, a frog so large that even a full-grown ape like Donkey Kong can ride him.
• The caverns in Dwarf Fortress have Giant Cave Toads and Giant Olms - the Giant Olms also come in the more anthropomorphic Giant Olm Man variant.
• Eastern Exorcist has a boss called the Miasma toad, depicted as a massive hopping amphibian monster that takes up a whole segment of a bridge. It periodically hops in and out of the water trying to flatten you, besides using it's claws for slashing.
• Fallout 76 has the car-sized Radtoads, who will attack you up-close with their pronged tongues and use their offspring as bombs that they can lay down around the environment.
• Fox N Forests: The first boss of the game is Furious Frog, who's a giant purple frog who attacks by jumping around, shooting his tongue at Rick, and attacking him with yellow globs.
• Garyo Retsuden has giant frogs and toads - the size of horse carriages - as Giant Mook enemies capable of absorbing plenty of hits before going down.
• Golden Sun:
  • The first game has the Dodonpa's pet monstrosity (and Optional Boss) Toadonpa, a surprisingly tough giant toad with poisonous attacks. When defeated, it lands on Dodonpa as he sneaks up on the party to backstab them. Recolored variants appear in another Bonus Dungeon as Devil Toads.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has Sludge, a gigantic salamander-like creature living under Kolima who tries to drown the party as they explore the dungeon.
• King's Bounty: In Armored Princess, the Orcs of Dersu Island worship a colossal frog as their god, feeding it humongous quantities of food to keep it pacified. A sidequest for the rival Goblin tribe on Uzala Island has you slay the frog.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Throughout the series, there are a race of mostly human-sized aquatic people (with a few being much larger than humans) called the Zora. In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, we see infant Zora who look like large tadpoles, implying that the Zora are in fact amphibians.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has the Deku Toad, a gargantuan amphibian who drops from the ceiling and is defeated by hitting its tongue. Midna panics at the sight of it.
  • One of Impa's special attacks in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity involves summoning an enormous frog to flatten all opposition.
• Jiu Xiao has a Frog Demon boss several times larger than you in the Floating Continent's inner sanctum, who can release a Shockwave Stomp each jump.
• The penultimate level of Leifeng Pagoda reveals the true form of Monk Fahai, where instead of a benevolent Master Monk, Fahai is actually a toad-demon appearing in the form of a red-skinned toad monster, as large as the room he's fought as a boss in. Defeating him as a toad behemoth and Fahai reverts to human form.
• In The Lord of the Rings Online, your character can encounter and battle fantastic amphibians of unusual size, among them toxic toads and fire-breathing salamanders (which are actually a class of dragon).
• Monster Hunter has several large frog-like monsters classified as Amphibians.
  • Monster Hunter 4 has Tetsucabra, a frog the size of a truck with large tusks, and Zamtrios, a half-frog half-shark creature the size of a tank. Zamtrios also has a juvenile form called Zamites that range from being as small as a regular frog to as big as a bear.
  • Monster Hunter: Rise adds Tetranadon, a kappa-like frog about as big as a car.
• Monster Hunter (PC) (unrelated to the above) has a level, "Hopping Mad!", containing giant frogs regularly dropping into the area, which can flatten the Hunter if he's directly underneath.
• The Night of the Rabbit: One of the magical realms has a giant, sleeping toad. Jerry must speak to it to learn a new spell. Jerry is initially scared of the toad, but he calms down when he realizes that the toad is harmless, if a bit grumpy. The toad later appears in the villain, Zaroff's, Perilous Play. Zaroff insists that the toad is a monster that will eat Jerry if Jerry gets too close, and brainwashes the toad to think so as well. Jerry restores the toad's memory, saving him from Zaroff's spell before he can do any harm.
• Nioh has the Giant Toad, who is exactly as large as his name implies and fights William with a spear.
• Pokémon has several large, amphibian-based Pokémon. Notable examples include Quagsire, a giant salamander that stands at four-foot-six, and Seismitoad, Greninja, and Swampert who all stand at four-foot-eleven while being a toad, frog, and axolotl or mudpuppy respectively. Swampert's mega evolution is even larger at six-foot-three, with muscles that rival the Hulk's. Venusaur, who has some frog-like traits, is normally six-foot-seven, and its mega evolution is seven-foot-ten, and, far more extreme than any other Pokémon is its Gigantamax form, a whopping 78'09".
• Seirei Senshi Spriggan has a giant frog monster as the boss in the swamp level, using its Overly-Long Tongue to lash out at the player's ship. Shoot its tongue until it explodes; and the tongue-less frog then changes attack to spitting acid from its mouth.
• In Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, when Big the Cat uses his All-Star move, his pet frog, Froggy, grows to an enormous size and hops across the track, with Big hanging onto Froggy's tail[[note]]the tail he acquired from Chaos in Sonic Adventure for his life.
• In Spiritfarer, Atul is a frog spirit who towers over Stella, a human.
• Spiritual Assassin Taromaru has a gigantic Surinam Toad (in Japan, go figure) serving as one of the bosses, who attacks you while you're on a raft. If you deplete it's health enough, it then swallows you on the spot leading to a Womb Level.
• Buzz, the first boss of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, is a large green toad-like monster.
• Cycrox from Temtem is a frog-ish, salamander-ish thing the size of a small horse.
• Touhou Project: Suwako (a frog goddess) is often shown in fanon as being able to call giant frogs in battle, though she mostly uses them to punish Cirno (an ice fairy) when she freezes frogs.
• World of Warcraft had Krag'wa the Huge, the frog loa worshiped by the Zandalari from the Expansion Pack Battle for Azeroth. He helps Talanji's Expedition against the Blood Trolls during the Nazmir swamp storyline, and the player gets to ride him and wreak havoc on Blood Troll armies at one point.

Webcomics

• Daughter of the Lilies: In a flashback, the gang is hired to safeguard a class of apprentice mages learning to summon demons into the bodies of small animals. The professor conjures up an ancient, powerful one into the body of a toad, which promptly devours him, grows to giant size, rampages through the city, and attempts to open a portal to hell the size of an entire city block.

Websites

• Amphiterra is a Speculative Biology project about an alternate timeline where instead of mammals or dinosaurs dominating the earth, it was the amphibians, producing forms such as the mammoth-like Eon Toad or the tyrannosaur-like Catastrophic Fraggon.

Western Animation

• Amphibia takes place in a world of anthropomorphic amphibians scaled up to human size, which means larger species are gargantuan by comparison. The episode "Quarreler's Pass" features olms the size of dragons, and King Andrias, who is based on the Chinese giant salamander, is Large and in Charge taken to the extreme, at about 20 feet tall.
• Avengers Assemble: One episode has Ms. Marvel having to deal with a large toad that was being transported by the NYPD until it got lose. No explanation is ever given as to the whys and wherefores.
• DuckTales (2017): The main antagonist of the episode "The House of the Lucky Gander!" is Toad Liu Hai, an ancient spirit taking the shape of an anthropomorphic toad. In the episode's climax, he takes a One-Winged Angel form, towering over the ducks.
• Futurama: In "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch", one of the native species of Kif's planet is a "poisonous froad", a giant purple amphibian that almost eats Bender until Kif scares it off.
• A Pup Named Scooby-Doo: The villain in the episode "The Schnook Who Took My Comic Book" is Dr. Croaker, a giant frog in white doctor's coat and the archenemy of Shaggy and Scooby's favorite comic book superhero, Commander Cool.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: In both the first animated and the 2012 Nickelodeon series, the Punk Frogs are large, humanoid frogs.

Real Life

• Not that big compared to the others mentioned in this folder, the Cretaceous amphibian Beelzebufo was still a huge frog compared to most living species (estimated length of 23-42.5 cm). Plus its name means "devil toad", and is believed to be able to eat small dinosaurs.
• Fragmentary remains of another prehistoric frog known from Chile suggest of an animal even bigger than Beelzebufo, possibly over two feet long if scaled to its close modern relative, which is already a huge frog.
• The Chinese giant salamander is the largest extant amphibian, reaching the length of 1.8 meters. Its scientific name, Andrias, means "human-like", appropriate for an animal near the size of a human.
• In prehistoric times, a number of gigantic amphibians known as Temnospondyls lived, including Mastodonsaurus from the Middle Triassic (and as mentioned above one of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs), Eryops from the Early Permian, and Koolasuchus from the Early Cretaceous. Largest of all was middle Permian Prionosuchus, with the largest found specimen estimated to be 9 meters long, far larger than even the largest crocodilians today. It also resembled a crocodile and likely filled their niche before true crocodilians evolved.

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