Not the Nessie

Some assembly required.

So the story takes us to a certain lake in Scotland, and our adventurers/detectives/four meddling kids and an animal find themselves investigating the legendary Loch Ness Monster. Frightening, water bound and usually fog-shrouded encounters with that legendary beastie follow, and at the denouement we find the mystery solved!

It wasn't a lake monster at all, but a disguised submarine.

We don't see this trope much today, but a submarine masquerading as Nessie to scare people away is the solution offered in a number of older films that feature that world famous lake monster. Variations include robot Nessies, paper mache monsters, and other counterfeits but the most often encountered version is a submersible ship, with a gargoyle head attached to give that scary sea serpent effect.

In these instances, the writers and producers were sheepish about introducing a real Loch Ness Monster into the world of the film. A sub with a monster head riveted onto it is the default answer to the enigma of Loch Ness, but might seem cheesy. It is a handy way to write off a Special Effects Failure, when it turns out that it was supposed to be fake all along.

There are two sources of this trope: the most well-known fake Nessie photo in history was, in fact, a toy submarine with a monster head; the other that the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, was initially misidentified as a sea monster.

This is a Sub-Trope of the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax; the specific solution of a strangely decorated submarine sets it off as a variant peculiar to that highland lake monster.

Also expect the real Nessie to show up at the end, when nobody's looking.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Played with in Dinosaur King. It's not a submarine, it's an Amargasaurus. As per the trope, the real Nessie shows up at the end.
• Lupin III has done this two different ways:
  • This one is "50 Ways to Leave Your 50-Foot Lover", a Lupin III: Part II episode. Fujiko's singing attracts the Loch Ness monster. Later on, when Lupin goes out onto the Loch, a Nessie-shaped submarine draws him in. The reason the sub was built? To catch the real Nessie — the scientist who built it has an Ahab complex towards the Loch Ness monster, and wants to use Fujiko to attract it so he can capture it.
  • Lupin III: Alcatraz Connection opens with a luxury gambling ship under attack by a sea monster that looks like Nessie! (It's an inflatable head Lupin is using to distract everyone while he steals all the money from the vault.)

Comedy

• Comedian Bill Hicks once mused that the Loch Ness Monster was a submarine driven by Bigfoot.

Comic Strips

• Alley Oop is about a time-traveling caveman named Alley Oop.
  • A few years ago, Alley's pet dinosaur Dinny tagged along for one adventure, and the pair wound up in medieval Scotland. Suffice it that the Scots have remembered Dinny's visit ever since.
  • Alley made a second (unintentional) visit to Scotland while bringing back two young plesiosaurs to the present; the two youngsters escape into the nearest lake, which just happens to be...

Films — Animated

• Scooby-Doo! and the Loch Ness Monster gives us three Nessies: a robotic submarine version, a less sophisticated (but still somehow totally convincing in appearance) "parade float" version, and the real monster. The real one looks very different than the impostors, namely having flippers and a tail fluke.

Films — Live-Action

• In a maritime variant, two prank-playing boys in Jaws use a cardboard fin to scare everyone out of the water just before the real shark shows up.
• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is probably the defining version of this trope. In this film, the Great Detective's brother, Mycroft, is directing top-secret development of Britain's first submarine in Loch Ness; an attached prop monster head keeps the local gentry fooled into thinking it's the beastie.
• The Walt Disney Presents film The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove involves an Expy of Loch Ness and Nessie; when a teacher thinks he saw the local monster and is ridiculed as a result, three of his kid students try to help his case by building a fake monster. Ultimately, it turns out that what the teacher had seen was actually smuggler's boat.
• An inversion of this trope is found in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. Nessie — or Crusoe, as she's called here — gets shelled by the British Army. Well, they thought she was a submarine! Also played straight, to a degree. Two old men keep trying to get a picture of Crusoe, but fail every time, so they fake it by putting a boat upside down in the water to produce the famous picture of the neck sticking out of the water. Interestingly, as they're faking it, the real one was right on the other side of a tree, in good view if they could've seen it.

Literature

• In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, many early accounts of the Nautilus's attacks speculated that it was a supersized narwhal or some other sea monster due to its habit of ramming into ships. (The first chapter of the book includes Shout-Outs to several celebrated sea-serpent sightings.) Certainly the Ur-Example of this trope in fiction, as nobody was writing about submarines before Verne.
• One short story featuring The Saint has the detective investigating a murder supposedly caused by the monster. It turns out that it was just a hoax to cover up the real murderer... who ends up killed by the real Nessie in the end!
• Yobgorble: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario by Daniel Pinkwater features a Nazi U-boat shaped like a giant pink pig, so that any Allied naval personnel who saw it would just assume it was a barnyard animal out for a swim and ignore the threat. It ends up trapped in Lake Ontario and mistaken for a Nessie-style lake monster.

Live-Action TV

• In the Doctor Who serial "Terror of the Zygons", the Fourth Doctor and his current companions arrive in Scotland and trace an alien signal to Loch Ness, where strange things have been happening recently. Don't worry, it's not Nessie... it's just a giant plesiosaur-shaped cyborg that provides food for the Zygons. Much more sensible.
• The Goodies follows the basic outline, but the monster is only shown to be fake long after it's captured, when a zookeeper talks about breeding it with another captured sea monster. A real Nessie also hatches from an egg after the zookeeper tried to kill himself in shame.
• This example takes place in Minnesota rather than Scotland, but in an episode of Little House on the Prairie, the children of Walnut Grove fabricate an Expy of Nessie to frighten Mrs. Oleson into leaving an old woman's lakeside house alone after the former tries to take it from the latter.
• In Murdoch Mysteries, an apparent monster in Lake Ontario turns out to be a rope-and-winch-controlled apparatus rigged up by a solitary beach-dweller, who'd wanted to scare bathers away from "his" beach because he hates how crowded it's become.
• Done in Sea Hunt, naturally enough, although it's only supposed to be a generic "sea serpent" and not Nessie herself.
• Stingray (1964), a series that has actual sea monsters in it, sends Troy Tempest and his crew to Loch Ness, where they find that Nessie is a robot, built in the 1940s and put through its paces to again encourage tourist travel to the loch.
• In the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "Secret of the Loch", the Seaview not only finds a navigable underwater passage into the Loch, but a Soviet — ahem, Enemy — submarine there, pretending to be the monster... and based on what the model work is like, doing a rather bad job of it. Some may feel quite cheated to find out that Nessie is a submarine in this one and, on considering how often Voyage has real sea monsters on the show, then feel really cheated.
• The X-Files: The episode "Quagmire" has Mulder and Scully investigating reports of a lake monster. In one scene the owner of the local tourist trap is shown faking some monster footprints, whereupon he gets eaten by the real monster, a large alligator. Of course, this being The X-Files, we see at the end that there really is a giant serpent in the lake.

Radio

• In the Hamish and Dougal episode "The Monster of the Loch", Hamish and Dougal fall in the loch and think they've been attacked by a strange, log-shaped monster, which turns out to be ... a log. After they've burned it to help them dry off, the Laird points out that the Glen's tourism industry absolutely depended on people seeing the log and mistaking it for a monster.

Video Games

• Played straight, then subverted in Mega Man Star Force 2. Geo goes to a foreign country where there is a legend of a monster called Messie. it is a submarine, but the director making money off of a 'Search of Messie' show runs into Hyde, who offers him a sea monster EM partner, Plesio, which he uses to become Plesio Surf.
• Monster Quest, being a Hidden Object Game about cryptids, naturally features this trope in the fourth mission, where you investigate a lake monster in Mexico known as El Monstro, where a shopkeeper claims to own both a skeleton of its baby and sells actual scales of it as charms. It turns out that the former is a forgery and the latter are garfish scales, both created to heklp attract customers and tourists to the shop.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney uses this one in the fourth case of the first game, with a creature named "Gourdy" being spotted in Gourd Lake. The monster's "head" that was captured on a photo was actually an inflatable Steel Samurai being blown along by the air tank that some idiot (Read: Larry Butz) was using to inflate it.
• In Tomb Raider III: The Lost Artifact, Lara can get up close and personal with a robotic Nessie which breathes fire. While Nessie can also be seen elsewhere — on the surface of the loch, in the distance — it's not clear whether they're one and the same.

Web Original

• Cracked's Famous Images, as Seen from a Different Angle depicts an elephant swimming and putting its trunk above the water as a snorkel, forming the famous photo of the Loch Ness monster. (Elephants actually do this.)

Western Animation

• Done in Denver the Last Dinosaur, though in this case, it's a guy trying to make money rather than keep people away.
• One episode of Gargoyles has an identical plot to the Lupin III episode listed above.
• The Gobblewonker from the Gravity Falls episode "The Legend of the Gobblewonker" turns out to be a robot controlled by local kook Old Man McGucket. Once again, there turns out to be a real Gobblewonker.
• Hero Elementary: Viral videos of lake monster "Soupie" chasing boaters prompt an investigation by the Sparks Crew, who discover it's actually a sunken and algae-coated swan boat from a defunct water park, which passing lake vessels keep snagging and pulling to the surface.
• The Inspector Gadget episode "Monster Lake" has a robotic Loch Ness monster.
• The LoliRock episode "Legend of Lake Agnes" is an interesting case where the heroines themselves have to perform a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax on the civilians they're boating with to cover up the actual monster the villains have sent to attack them, ultimately convincing them that the lake monster "Aggie" is benevolent when "she" helps them out. Despite having to do this, Iris says in her narration that she still believes that not everything on Earth has been discovered. Naturally, we cut back to Lake Agnes...
• An episode of The Magic School Bus has an inflatable lake monster, planted by an unscrupulous journalist who wants to become famous by getting the "scoop" on the monster.
• In one of the 1960s Popeye shorts, Olive is a newspaper reporter sent to Scotland to photograph the Loch Ness monster. Popeye goes along "just for laughs", and shows her that the monster is mechanical.
• The Raccoons: In the episode "Monster Mania!", Melissa Raccoon takes a blurry photo of a creature in Evergreen Lake. Soon, the place is teeming with sightseers wanting to catch a glimpse of the elusive, fire-breathing "Evie". It turns out that Evie is a robot, part of a plan by Cyril Sneer to drive up tourism.
• The Simpsons: In "Monty Can't Buy Me Love", Mr. Burns drains Loch Ness to find the monster, but it turns out that it's just the Loch Ness High School float — which is then stomped on by the real Loch Ness monster.
• In the Thomas & Friends episode "Bad Day at Castle Loch", Donald and Douglas are sent to Lord Callan's castle to deliver party supplies for its reopening. On their way, the twins get trapped by a fallen tree and a landslide, having no choice but to spend the night where they are until help arrives to save them. During that night, the twins see a Loch Ness Monster-like shape in the mist, and worry it's the Monster out to get them. Fortunately for them, it was just Harvey the crane engine pushing the breakdown crane, and their arms gave them the appearance of the Monster's head and tail.

Real Life

• Zoo education director John Shields once pranked some Nessie-hunting colleagues by planting the doctored carcass of an elephant seal, recently expired of natural causes at Flamingo Park Zoo, floating offshore in Loch Ness.
• The Royal Navy tested and trained with its ultra-secret midget submarines in Scottish lochs, including Ness. The reasoning was that any sightings could be mistaken for loch monsters, which would only help to confuse and obscure what was really going on there.

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