Sewer Gator

Sewer later, alligator.

Dean: An alligator in the sewer. Come on.
Sam: What? Well, Dean, it's a classic urban legend. A kid flushes a baby gator down the toilet, and it grows huge in the tunnels.
Dean: But no-one's ever really found one. I mean, th—they're not real.

— Supernatural, "Tall Tales"

Alligators that have been flushed down the toilet will end up living in the sewers down below the streets. Most of the time, these alligators can be an example of Never Smile at a Crocodile. They are sometimes said to be albinos, like many real cave-dwelling creatures, due to living in a mostly lightless environment (note that cave-dwelling albino creatures are that way in real life due to having evolved to be that way over countless generations — but by the same token, some Sewer Gators have been living down there long enough to have bred up a few generations as well). Many fictional works make alligators grow to gigantic proportions or become indestructible killing machines from all the chemicals (often growth and/or rage inducing) found in sewers, and thanks to a steady diet of rats, vagrants, sewer workers, and incautious investigators.

Crocodiles are sometimes substituted for alligators, to much the same practical effect. Crocodile- and lizard-people are the most common variant, regardless of whether they were regular crocodilians or humans before spending too much time wading through sewage and toxic waste. Other variants sometimes replace crocodilians with some other variety of exotic pet reptiles — giant mutant lizards turn up from time to time; more parodic examples may throw in giant mutant goldfish and the like. Depending on how wild a work cares to get, there may be a whole ecosystem of carelessly disposed-of animals down there.

Of course, this trope is entirely fictional and unrealistic. Not only because it relies on Absurdly Spacious Sewer, itself a fictional and unrealistic trope, but also because there's just plain nothing to eat in a sewer, and alligators (and crocodilians in general) need to bask in the sun in order to properly digest their food or else it will rot in their stomachs. In addition, the sewers used for this trope are depicted as the sewers under streets and sidewalks. These sewers are used for storm run-off and drainage to prevent flooding. A baby gator flushed down a toilet wouldn't end up there, but would instead go into the water treatment system, where the filters and chemicals found in a water treatment plant would quickly kill it.

The alligator-in-the-sewer thing is probably one of the oldest Urban Legends that New York City has.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• A Centaur's Life: It's a little hard to tell if it's a sewer or what, but during her childhood Sasasul ended up in a big wet underground space and was confronted by a massive six-legged crocodilian.
• Heat Guy J: As Daisuke and J look for Daisuke's bullet pendant in the Absurdly Spacious Sewers of Judoh in the "Circulation" episode, an alligator briefly surfaces near the boat that they are travelling in.
• Patlabor: Special Vehicles Unit 2 encounters giant underground alligators at least twice:
  • In the Patlabor: The TV Series episode "The Underground Mystery Tour", while investigating a series of thefts at the station, they learn about tunnels beneath the reclaimed land that look an awful lot like sewers. Inhabitants include numerous rats, feral cats, the homeless man behind the thefts, and an enormous albino aligator that chases them around for the last third of the episode.
  • In the Patlabor The New Files episode "The Dungeon Again", when they hear about a very valuable pearl that was secreted by an albino alligator that was recently captured from the sewers beneath the SV2 hanger, some mechanics go into the tunnels to see if they can find some more, and a rescue team is sent in after them when they do not return. They run into booby traps left a by a crazy guy living there, and when they find the "pearls", it turns out that they were actually eggs.
• Pokémon: The Original Series: The Orange Islands episode "The Mystery Menace" could be seen as a reference to this trope, as it involves a reptilian Pokémon being abandoned in the sewers (though it was floated into them in a box rather than flushed), growing to gigantic proportions, and attacking the main characters. Unlike most examples, the reptile in question (a Bulbasaur) isn't actively malicious; the reason it's kidnapping people and Pokémon is so that it can have a friend. It ultimately gets its wish at the episode's end, as the local Nurse Joy offers to take care of it.

Comic Books

• Astro City: One of the outcast heroes that was recruited by Bravo to become one of the founding members of the Astro City Irregulars was a mutant alligator that lived in the sewers of Astro City with the unoriginal name of Alligator.
• Babe: The second series by John Byrne has the title character fighting an army of Cyborg alligators coming from the sewers under the control of Shrewmanoid.
• The DCU:
  • In Batman #577 ("Mike and Allie"), while searching for the source of the rats that are infesting the Batcave, Batman finds a blind girl who ran away from home and lived with a group of sewer gators after her abusive foster parent flushed her pet alligator down the toilet. She grew close enough to the gators to develop a Psychic Link with them.
  • In a story told over five seven-page back-ups in Wonder Woman (1942) #309-313, the Huntress tracks down a baby trafficking villain called Earthworm in the Gotham sewers. He uses his control over the animals in the sewers to make some alligators attack her.
• Cattivik, despite being set in the sewers of an indeterminate Italian city, mentions a sewer crocodile, to whom the titular character plans to give a birthday cake (with a steel ball hidden inside), and in another story he uses the crocodile in the process of discarding possible theft victims (read: after preparing a list he lets him bite at it and pick from the still legible names). A third story kickstarts the plot by having a Nile Crocodile escaping into the sewers as Cattivik is washing, and is shown to be so harmless that the protagonist briefly considers adopting him.
• E-Man: Big Al, a villain introduced "The Sewer of Doom" story, is a talking, cigar-smoking, albino sewer gator who wants to conquer the world in the name of reptile-kind.
• Judge Dredd: In the story "Gator" from 2000 AD progs #384-386, two perps are eaten by blind, white alligators while running from Dredd in the sewers and Dredd himself is almost killed. Just as he is about to arrest the boss of the sewage works for negligence in allowing the tunnels to become infested with gators, Dredd learns that a survival club is in the tunnels, and he has to go back down to save them.
• Marvel Universe:
  • In Daredevil #180 ("The Damned"), Ben Urich realizes a bag lady in pictures of an abandoned subway tunnel looks like the missing Vanessa Fisk and contacts Daredevil to help him find her. While they are looking for Vanessa in the tunnels, Ben and Daredevil are captured by a group of homeless people. They are brought before the Sewer King, who he feeds them to an alligator that the King had raised ever since he found it flushed down a toilet as an infant.
  • In The Mighty Thor #364-365, as part of the The Fight for Asgard storyline, Thor is transformed into a frog by Loki and ends up in Central Park. While there, he becomes involved with a war between a kingdom of frogs and an evil army of rats. Since most of the frogs aren't really capable of standing up to the rats, Thor decides to investigate the frog's legends about "dragons" that live in the sewers and they turn out to be the Piper's alligators. Thor steals his instrument away and leads the gators to feast on the rats.
  • Ms. Marvel (2014): One of Kamala's first enemies are sewer gators both giant and armed with laser cannons thanks to the local supervillain.
  • Untold Tales of Spider-Man: The Lizard takes reptiles from the zoo in the issue "Cry... Lizard!" and leads them into the sewers to make them into an army.
    Spider-Man: Alligators in the sewers, Lizzie? Isn't that a little... cliché?
  • In Wolverine (1982) #41, Wolverine and Sabretooth clash in the New York City sewers and encounter both the Morlocks and multiple sewer alligators. Sabretooth proceeds to rip the throats out of several of the gators.
  • X-Men: The Piper is a mutant who lives in the New York sewers and keeps a pack of alligators under his control with the music from his flute.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side: A New York sewer-gator goes back to Florida to visit his relatives, and arrives at their riverbank in a taxi, walking upright and wearing a Hawaiian Shirt.
  "Well, for crying out loud! ... It's Uncle Irwin from the city sewer!"
• Garfield: Parodied in a strip where Garfield falls into a sewer and meets up with a giant alligator living down there, along with a canary and a goldfish that have also become giant after ending up in the sewer. Garfield comments that their new gigantic sizes are just ridiculous.
• Sherman's Lagoon:
  • A storyline has an alligator from the sewers of New York visit the lagoon via a large pipe.
  • A strip has Sherman and Megan lost in New York while on vacation. They get directions from an alligator in the sewer and comment that New York gets a bad rap since the alligator was very polite.

Films — Animation

• All Dogs Go to Heaven: King Gator is a big-lipped alligator (yeah, THAT big-lipped alligator) living in the New Orleans sewers, worshipped by the sewer rats.
• An American Tail: Played with. It's just a garden lizard, but, due to the protagonist being a mouse, it's the size of one proportionally. It shows up to eat the roaches trying to eat him, letting him get away.
• Highlander: The Search for Vengeance: A huge (and probably mutated) alligator lives in the canals in post-apocalyptic New York.
• The Secret Life of Pets: The "Flushed Pets" are a criminal organization of former pets living in the sewers, led by a maniacal rabbit, who have sworn revenge against humans. As you might expect, one of them's an alligator.
• The Wild sees the zoo animals meeting up with a pair of alligators in the sewer who turn out to be friendly and help the heroes find the way to the Statue of Liberty.

Films — Live-Action

• Alligator is about an alligator in the sewers of Chicago that grows to enormous size and begins killing humans after it eats the corpses of dogs that had been given illegal growth hormones.
• The Amazing Spider-Man: Not a gator, but the Lizard takes residence in the sewer and also makes a small lab inside. After being transported to the Marvel Cinematic Universe during the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange states that he found the Lizard in the sewers under New York City before capturing him.
• Candyman: Briefly discussed with Trevor's students bringing up multiple versions of the story, set variously in Miami or New York City. Trevor points to the discrepancy as an example of how the details are always shifting and mutable in folklore.
• The Dark Knight Rises: When Gordon told his superiors about Bane's hideout in the sewers, they mocked him by asking if he saw any giant alligators as well, a subtle nod to Batman villain Killer Croc. Oddly enough, Batman fought Killer Croc in the sewers in the "In Darkness Dwells" segment of the Interquel, Batman: Gotham Knight.
• Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: A Baryonyx — a carnivirous dinosaur with elongated jaws, which in this case is given an exaggerated resemblance to a crocodile — appears before the protagonists from the sewers, in the same way a sewer gator would.
• The Pool (2018): A couple are trapped in a six-metre deep swimming pool when the water drains out. Things go From Bad to Worse when a crocodile crawls out of the drainage manhole.
• Sharknado 2: The Second One: There's a giant gator in the sewer, but it's eaten by a shark.
• Suicide Squad (2016): Killer Croc's room at Belle Reve is designed to imitate a sewer.

Gamebooks

• Lone Wolf: Not alligators exactly, but close enough: the Baga-darooz in Barrakeesh is an Absurdly Spacious Sewer inhabited by Kwaraz (giant carnivorous lizards) among other monsters. A couple of them can try to eat the hero during his visit in book 5, Shadow on the Sand.

Literature

• In City of the Dead by Brian Keene, some zombie alligators attack the fleeing humans as they travel through the sewers.
• In "Croatoan" by Harlan Ellison, the alligators are ridden by unwanted fetuses who were also flushed down toilets.
• Croc is a 1976 novel by David James. In it, a crocodile somehow winds up in the NYC sewers and has been living there for years. Two sewer workers are down in there investigating a blockage, and the croc chomps one of them. The other guy (Peter Boggs) escapes, and is later talked into going down there to try to shoot the gator with a pistol. He is stuck down there for the rest of the story, and the other characters are cops who become convinced that a croc is in the sewers. They head down to try to rescue the guy, and kill the croc.
• Goblin Slayer: Below the holy city lives a mystical animal that looks like a giant, white alligator. It is considered a holy guardian, and the elf among the adventurers fearfully calls him a swamp dragon.
• Gotrek & Felix: According to the spinoff novel Grey Seer, the sewers under the Imperial capital Altdorf are inhabited by albino crocodiles from the Southlands (Africa), originally escaped from a previous emperor's menagerie. Of course, they're not the only danger down there with the Skaven around.
• Illuminatus! has a passing mention of the Illuminati going to some effort to suppress the Sewer Gators under Manhattan, as, left unchecked, they might promote more courage among the ignorant masses than the Illuminati would like.
• Joe's World: Towards the end of The Philosphical Strangler, the protagonists are forced to navigate a sewer, which is home to a giant troll who mostly (and unhappily) subsists on the baby alligators that people keep flushing.
• Log Horizon: One of dungeons described in the Eastern Yamato Map is a sewer that extends from underground of Akiba to Kanda called Kanda Flume / Akiba Sewer that is populated by monsters that are inspired by Urban Legends, including a white alligator.
• Neverwhere: Hunter in a Badass Boast says that she killed the biggest of the New York sewer gators.
  Hunter's voice was quiet and intense. She did not break her step as she spoke. "I fought in the sewers beneath New York with the great blind white alligator-king. He was thirty feet long, fat from sewage and fierce in battle. And I bested him, and I killed him. His eyes were like huge pearls in the darkness."
• No Left Turns, by Joseph L. Schott, mentions an anecdote about a woman who was told by an ecologist at a party that when the gators got big enough, they'd come back up the toilets to get revenge on their former owners. This freaked her out so much that on her analyst's advice she moved to California, as the Pacific would be too cold for alligators.
• Sewer, Gas & Electric: There are entire hit squads patrolling the sewers on heavily armed gunboats in search of these and other critters (such as the plot-relevant Great White Shark codenamed "Meisterbrau"). The turnover rate is atrocious.
• Shadowrun: In the second book of the Never Deal with a Dragon trilogy, the protagonist Sam learns that generations of childhood belief in the fact that alligators live in sewers after being flushed has caused them to become an urban magical totem as well as a nature one.
• A Storm of Swords: Although not specifically alligators or crocodilians, the sewers of Meereen are home to large white lizard-like creatures that will attack humans if they encounter them.
• The Truth: The salesman CMOT Dibbler briefly peddles a kind of "Fung Shooey". He is so good at it that one buyer discovers that the Dragon of Unhappiness literally comes up through a lavatory which has been celestially mis-aligned and bites the believer in the bum.
• One of the illustrations in Underground by David Macaulay shows a cutaway section of a city street. There's an alligator in the sewer.
• V.: In chapter 5, Benny Profane hunts with the Alligator Patrol in the sewers of Manhattan. According to the narration, he had already managed to bag four gators and a rat during his first two weeks on the job.
• Wild Cards: Sewer Jack is an Ace with the power to shapeshift into an alligator. As his name indicates, he has taken to hunting in the sewers in his alligator form when he is not working as a NYC Transit worker.
• The Wild Ones has Gayle, a ferocious alligator who preys on animals who fall or wander into her territory by mistake.
• The X-Files: In one book, Agent Mulder and another agent track a kind of werecrocodile in a sewer.

Live-Action TV

• The Carbonaro Effect: One target thought she was assisting a realtor, when he pulled a small lizard out of the kitchen sink... and then one nearly twice that size. He eventually told her that this trope was so common that there was a "lizard law" in realty.
• Doctor Who: In "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", Susan is almost eaten by alligators that escaped from zoos during The Plague and managed to thrive in the London sewers.
• Grimm: The wesen from "Cold Blooded (Part One)" is an alligator-like creature. They originally served the Praetorian Guard and hid in the aqueducts after the fall of Rome.
• Hill Street Blues: Someone on the city council of... wherever the series is actually set takes this urban legend seriously enough that the SWAT Team carries out an annual alligator hunt in the city sewers. Detectives LaRue and Washington acquire a very convincing foam-rubber model alligator, strap it to a skateboard and launch it towards the search team while they're down there. Later, the pissed-off leader of the SWAT Team slams a box full of the shot-up pieces of the foam-rubber gator on Furillo's desk and demands he do something. Furillo can barely keep a straight face.
  Furillo: Well, we've got to give them credit for originality this time.
• Lost Girl: The Alligator Fae introduced in the "SubterrFaenean" episode are a type of Under-Fae, Fae that cannot pass as human, that were rounded up and quarantined in the sewers when they started showing signs of a mysterious illness.
• Monster Warriors: In "Gators!", a family of giant aligators are in the sewers and it's up to the Monster Warriors to get rid of them.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Parodied in a conversation between two old ladies, wjere one retells the urban legend... except that in her version it's budgerigars that get flushed down the toilet and breed in the sewers, leading to flocks of evil-smelling mutant budgies flying out of people's lavatories.
• Mystery Hunters: One episode features Christina heading to New York City to investigate reports of alligators supposedly living in the sewers.
• The Naked Truth: Nora gets assigned alligator duty in the "Sewer Gators, Swordplay, Santa from Hell!" episode which consists of searching the sewers for gators and trying to get pictures for The Comet. At the end of the episode, all of Nora's friends who have joined her in the sewers for Christmas dinner are chased off by an alligator, except for Camilla who stays to get pictures.
• Primeval: A Kaprosuchus (a prehistoric crocodile) comes into an apartment as a young animal and is washed down into the loo by the resident. He then lives in the sewers until he grows up and then kills many people to eat them.
• Supernatural: The third victim in "Tall Tales" is an animal researcher who is devoured by a sewer gator after sticking his hand down the drain to get a gold watch at the bottom. The gator was created by The Trickster because the researcher is involved in Animal Testing.
• The X-Files: In "The Host", a sewage worker claims that he caught one such gator a few years ago and speculates that the Monster of the Week may be someone's pet python that was flushed into the sewer.

Music

• Radiohead: "Fog" from the Knives Out album is also called "Alligators in New York Sewers" because the reference to this trope in the chorus.
  Baby alligators in the sewers grow up fast
  Grow up fast

Radio

• I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: A gag in Series 72, Episode 1, involved TV adventurer Ben Fogle traveling to Australia to find out if there's any truth to the rumours that there's a massive crocodile in the sewers of Darwin. It turns out to be a giant croc of shit.

Tabletop Games

• Alternity: The Dragon Magazine magazine #269 article "Urban Legends" adapts the sewer gator legend for the Dark•Matter (1999) setting. Rather than any human origin, the gators are introduced to the sewers by the Kinori to guard their subterranean bases. The Hoffman Institute have recently begun to find Kinori remains in the digestive tracts of the gators.
• Chronicles of Darkness:
  • Crocodile spirits from the Book of Spirits are inhumanly patient when settling any grudge, appearing out of nowhere to drag their prey into the Spirit World. Their sudden appearances gave birth to many tales of sewer alligators.
  • Promethean: The Created: One of the NPCs from the core book is the Great Albino Alligator, a Pandoran of the Sebek lineage. Back when New York was called New Amsterdam, a collector with an interest in Egyptian artifacts brought the half man, half crocodile Pandoran to the city under the belief that it was a statue made by an ancient Nile cult. A young Nepri accidentally awoke the Pandoran while searching for an amulet amongst the collection. After the Great Albino Alligator found and consumed the young Nepri, it descended into the sewers to hunt any Prometheans that sought solace within them.
  • "Urban Legends": As urban growth started to overrun the wetlands home to alligators, an incarnation of an unknowable entity that was once worshiped as Sobek was drawn to the alligators' want for survival. The incarnation came into being in the only suitable environment close to the old wetlands: the sewer system. The supernatural influence of the incarnation strengthened alligators and drew them to it. The incarnation has also begun to draw humans into a cult, slowly transforming the worshippers into beasts no different from the alligators and changing the tunnels to more closely resemble the swamps and jungles that alligators call home.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In the Dungeon magazine #10 adventure "Nine-Tenths of the Law", an underground cesspool has six white alligators that were flushed down a drain and ended up in the sewers.
  • In the Polyhedron magazine #75 adventure "You've Lost Your Marbles!", while exploring a sewer to find the title marbles, the Player Characters will have to fight two crocodiles that were released there when they became too big to continue being kept as pets.
  • Planescape: The Trocopotaca are large, white-skinned alligator-like monsters that dwell in the sewers underneath Sigil. Most inhabitants of Sigil consider them to be myths.
• GURPS has a few different takes on the Urban Legend:
  • Discworld Roleplaying Game: The scenario about mapping Ankh-Morpork's forgotten sewers includes "the Albino Alligators, who have arrived from a different set of narrative assumptions".
  • GURPS Black Ops: Sightings of Sewer Flukes are said to create the legend of sewer gators. How a giant, white centipede is mistaken for an alligator is not exactly clear.
  • Monsters for third edition has Specimen Alpha-39, an alligator that was used as a guinea pig for genetic experiments and was disposed of via the sewers. It now rules the Jersey sewers with its enhanced intelligence and size.
  • Monster Hunters 3: The Enemy for fourth edition plays this straight with the Albino Alligators. This version is blind but capable of tracking prey by sound or by the vibrations in the sewage that they make while moving around.
  • Transhuman Space: The urban legend has developed into the Lurker Below, a huge alligator-like creature with writhing tentacles along its back, supposedly created by experimental biotech being flushed into the sewers and altering whatever's already down there.
• Illuminati: The collectable version features an "Albino Alligators" card.
• Iron Kingdoms: The "Urban Adventure" supplement details a savage tribe of albino gatormen that have lived in the sewers of Corvis and preyed upon the homeless ever since they fled the wrath of another tribe.
• It Came From The Late Late Show: The Giant Alligator Monsters are based on the Urban Legend. They're angry about being flushed into the sewers and express their feelings by eating subway commuters and sewer workers.
• Judge Dredd: The War Game from Warlords Games describes the sewers of Mega-City One as being infested with giant, white alligators.
• Magic: The Gathering: The urban plane of New Capenna, based on the prohibition-era United States, is home to sewer crocodiles.
  "Quick, let's hide in the sewer!"

  — Ginsi the Thief, now deceased
• Necromunda: Legend has it that the Sumpkrocs some wealthy members of House Goliath often keep as pets are cloned and genetically modified descendants of the reptilian pets once fashionable amongst hive nobility that were thrown into waste shuts when they grew too big. The 3rd Edition of the game allows such creatures to be purchased as wargear by Goliath Leaders and Champions as tough and loyal Attack Animals.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: Nosferatu vampires will sometimes train alligators to protect their lairs beneath the cities, represented by the Reptile Buddy merit. The practical problems with alligators actually living in the sewers can be handwaved by the vampires turning them into ghouls and by Nosferatu digging and fostering entire warrens and fungal ecosystems down there anyway. Calebros, the ex-prince of New York, has a gigantic pet albino alligator called Charioteer that is trained to ferry visitors through the sewers to one of his sanctums. Ghoul alligators also show up as foes in Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption in the drains.
  • Werewolf: The Forsaken: A powerful sewer-spirit from the Predators supplement book is described as a deformed giant rat riding "a great albino alligator".
• Paranoia: In the "Sewerworld" segment of the adventure Send in the Clones, the PC Troubleshooters can encounter gatorbots living in the sewers.
• Shadowrun:
  • Ghost Gators are Awakened, albino sewer gators that show up in the 4th ed adventures Back in Business and On a Silver Platter. They are four meters long while still managing to be stealthy, can Wall Crawl, and their skin is tough enough to resist small arms fire.
  • While mundane alligators don't live in the sewers, the prevalence of the Urban Legend is enough that Gator Shamans work just fine in an urban enviroment.
• Unknown Armies: Urbanomancers, adepts whose occult powers revolve around cities, keep albino alligators in the sewers as pets.
• Victoriana: In the supplement Faces in the Smoke Volume Two: Shadows and Steel, one of the Adventure Hooks for the Fellowship of the Red Pharaoh is hunting for a giant crocodile that has escaped from a London zoo and is hiding in the sewers.

Toys

• Flush Force: Croco Bile and Chomp Bucket are a pair of sewer-dwelling alligators that wear buckets on their heads.

Video Games

• Apocalypse: The second stage, the sewers, appropriately ends with the hero fighting a kaiju-sized gator as its stage boss.
• Batman: Presumably drawing on his representation in the animated series, Killer Croc is usually found in the sewers in some games.
  • LEGO Batman Trilogy:
    • He's chased through the sewers before a boss fight with him. The corresponding villain level begins in the sewers and involves him leading the Penguin through said sewers to rescue Catwoman from the police station (apparently right before leading the Dynamic Duo on the chase that ends in his defeat).
    • His next story-relevant role in LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham starts with the Dynamic Duo chasing him through the abandoned metro demolished in the second game, and his boss fight this time taked place specifically in a sewer area.
  • Batman: Arkham Series:
    • Batman: Arkham Asylum: Croc's "cell" is actually a network of disused sewers on Arkham Island, beneath the asylum itself. Hardly surprising, since it's unlikely any normal cell would fit him; he's stated as being eleven feet tall! Croc never escapes the sewers during the Joker's takeover, but Batman has to descend into the sewers to find a certain plant to cure Titan transformation... and to apprehend the Scarecrow.
    • Batman: Arkham City: Croc's new "home" within Arkham City is the sewer network right beneath it. He's also taken over parts of the subway in there as well. Croc is never encountered unless you do something specific at a certain point in the game. Do this, and a short cutscene in the sewer where he and Batman talk will play, and you can then find a small out-of-the-way room in there with a broken mattress and the Shock Collar he wore back at the asylum.
• Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: The "Infection" map from the Exo Zombies campaign has the Insta-Gator trap that summons a pack of alligators to devour any zombie that wanders into the sewer water.
• Claws of Furry: When you reach the sewer levels, you will fight against anthropomorphic alligators.
• Crysis 3: In the "Root of All Evil" level, there, is a broken pipe with a fish on it. If you interact with the fish, an alligator will swim out. It can even be ridden!
• The Darkside Detective: Twin Lakes is rumored to have them, although McQueen meets a tourist guide who claims to have invented the rumor because he suspected tourists were getting bored with the city's real monsters. Dooley later meets a real one.
• Déjà Vu (1985): You can be attacked by an alligator while in the sewer.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures: The second level primarily takes place in a sewer, and alligators are a common and strong enemy that take multiple hits and deal a lot of damage quickly.
• Evil Nun: In later versions of the game, there is a sewer area in the school that you can try to escape through, but you will need to get past Sister Madeline's pet crocodile that lives in there and is vicious enough to even attack its owner. The crocodile's presence can be explained by Madeline placing it there herself.
• EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance: The appropriately-named Gator enemies that roam the sewers in the first half of Stage 3.
• Fetch: Milo fed a baby alligator Gator-Gro before flushing it. This resulted in a monster gator which, once freed from its captivity by Embark, Inc. helps him escape the sewers.
• Final Fantasy XII has Baritine Crocs in the areas of the Garamsythe Waterway beyond the sluice gates.
• Flight Rising: The Waterway Coliseum venue is based on a sewer and features Toridae, alligator-like enemies.
• Garry's Mod: "Sewer Medic" behaves like one of these; he lives in the sewer, and, although he seems to have some intelligence, it's mostly used to warn others to stay out of his sewer. If you don't leave immediately, it won't end well.
• Gas Station Simulator's Car Wash update introduced a big one named Gustave who enjoys being fed garbage.
• Grim Fandango: One of the puzzles in year 4 is finding a way to get around a huge albino gator that is blocking the way to Bowlsley's sewer hideout.
  Manny: I don't see how Sal, with all his crazy conspiracy theories, forgot to mention to me that there were alligators in the sewers.
• Referenced in Hotline Miami, as you can find the alligator mask and its mortally wounded previous wearer underneath a manhole cover as an Easter Egg.
• Jackass The Game: The player has to dodge gators while rafting down the sewers in the "Brown Water Rafting".
• Kingdom of Loathing: Sewer Gators live in the Maze of Sewer Tunnels that connect the clan basement with Hobopolis. They're not descended from flushed-away baby gators — they just wandered in through regular sewer openings and grew so big on a diet of rats that they couldn't fit back the way they came, so they're stuck down there and a little cranky about it. The actual descendants of improperly disposed-of pets — or, well, deceased pets — are the giant zombie goldfish that also live down there (you know how goldfish grow larger or smaller depending on how big their tank is? Well, that goes for the undead kind as well, and a sewer system's pretty large...)
• Later Alligator: Played for Laughs. The entire cast of the game are fully anthropomorphic alligators, but examining a sewer grate in the downtown area reveals that there appears to be someone living in there, who waves to the player and says hello.
• Lethal League: Latch is a cyborg crocodile who makes his home in the sewers of Shine City.

• Nuclear Throne: The sewer level contains bipedal gator-man mutants. Unlike most video game examples, these don't do collision damage... instead they wield shotguns and are incredibly dangerous at close range but no threat at far range, creating a similar effect in the run-and-gun format.
• Parasite Eve: The final boss of day one is a mutated alligator in the sewers beneath Carnegie Hall.
• Planescape: Torment: The Trocopotaca are large, white-skinned monsters that resemble horned alligators and live in the Drowned Nations underneath the Hive. They're considered myths by most Hive residents.
• Psychonauts: Sometimes a plunger-wielding G-Man will say that "There are no documented cases of alligators found alive in sewers".
• Resident Evil 2 and its remake: A gigantic alligator mutated by the T-Virus appears as a boss battle when the player traverses the Raccoon City sewers (it's little more than an Advancing Boss of Doom in the remake, however). Resident Evil: Survivor ups the ante with two of them simultaneously, despite the game being set on the fictional Sheena Island.
• Superhero League of Hoboken: The sixth mission requires the League to defeat fifteen Alligators From Hell that can be found in the New York sewers.
• Temtem: The crocodile-like Gharunder is adapted to live in highly toxic environments, and can exclusively be found in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer.
• Thimbleweed Park: Referenced several times, like when Willie mentions finding a nice spot in the sewers and that he's had "almost no alligator bites", when you do visit the sewers you can actually encounter a Sarcosuchus skeleton.
• Trio the Punch has alligators emerging from sewer pipes in a Down the Drain level.
• True Crime: New York City: There is an alligator at either end of the Sewer Tunnel fight arena.
• Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue: One of the missions involves getting rid of a bunch of crocodiles in the Burramudgee sewers. Not alligators, crocodiles.
• Ultraverse Prime has a level inside a massive sewer where you'll fight numerous gator-human hybrids as enemies. They're the most common enemies in the sewer, followed by sewer mutants.
• Where's My Water?: Swampy and all the other gators live in the sewers of some unnamed city.
• The Wind Road has a gigantic alligator boss fought in an underground cavern, supposedly the game's equivalent to a gigantic sewer system.
• Wizard101: The goal of the "Sell Out" and "Raging Rumors" quests is to retrieve a newspaper from Gamma for Zan'ne because all the other papers were sold due to interest in a story about sewer gators.
  Zan'ne: Alligators in the sewers? They're everywhere!
• World of Warcraft:
  • A level 50 albino crocolisk called the Sewer Beast is a rare spawn in the canals of Stormwind City.
    Justin: You know there are crocolisks in the Canals. They were brought from the swamp as pets, but got thrown in the canals.
  • In the Underbelly section of Dalaran there is a sewer pipe near the Black Market that contains a crocolisk called the Underbelly Croc that snaps at anyone who gets near.
  • The "Crocolisks in the City" fishing quest requires catching some baby crocolisks that a travelling merchant sold to some gullible children and then escaped into the waterways of Stormwind and Orgrimmar. The reward can include a crocolisk battle pet.
    Old Man Barlo: Catch any crocs in the sewers yet?

Webcomics

• Girl Genius:
  • An albino alligator can be seen snapping at Violetta and Tarvek as they make their way through the sewers of Mechanicsburg.
  • Much later, a certain Professora hops across the backs of several them while in the same sewers.
• Madame Outlaw: While escaping the Hahn fortress in St. Augustine, Florida, Heath and Estelle take the storm drains and run into a gator.
• Skin Horse: Colma, California has zombie gators in the sewers.
• Super Stupor: Shockodile is a four-ton electricity-generating crocodile that lives in the sewers — but resents the implication that he eats children to live. He does, just not to live. Oh, and he's a hero.
• Uh-Oh, It’s a Dinosaur: Crocodiles, "liberated" from the local zoo and since lost track of, have been living in the sewers.

Web Originals

• How to Hero features sewer gators as a type of threat superheroes might have to deal with. At one point, toilet gators are mentioned. These are gators that swim up the pipes and bite you while you're using the toilet. The author assures readers that these are very real.
• Pirates SMP: One crocodile resides in the sewer network underneath the Town Center. Its Nigh-Invulnerability and ever-lurking presence is an obstacle to any seafarer going down to visit the Bounty Hall.
• Snopes, naturally, records the classic urban legend about giant alligators living in the New York sewer system.
• Strong Bad Email: In "Unnatural", Strong Bad references this trope as an explanation for why Bubs has turned giant, by theorizing he was flushed down the toilet. He was right, as Bubs later explains he accidentally flushed himself down the toilet while shaving. An Easter Egg shows Strong Bad trying to invoked this on himself.
• SuperMarioLogan: "Bowser Junior's Broccoli Problem!" has a sewer crocodile, who doesn't like being called an alligator, and infiltrates Junior's house after the latter flushes his broccoli down the toilet. When Chef Pee Pee notices the crocodile looking for food in the kitchen, he overreacts and tries to call a crocodile hunter, but he hears that the hunter died from a stingray attack, and instead calls the Brooklyn Guy to help. At the end, the Brooklyn Guy makes a deal with the crocodile that the latter can be the house's garbage disposal, much to Chef Pee Pee's annoyance and frustration.
• Torchwood: The online Bonus Material for season one (no longer available) strongly implied that the "alligators" in the New York sewers are actually Weevils.

Western Animation

• Aaahh!!! Real Monsters occasionally shows alligators living in the sewers with the monsters. One episode has Ickis learning to ride the alligators as part of a quest.
• The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police:
  • "That Darn Gator": Sam and Max adopt a baby alligator after Max vacuums it up from the toilet. Max names the reptile John, because "that's where we found him". Their own attempts flush John away when he gets too big to handle only manages to get his head stuck.
    Geek: What are you doing?
    Sam: Returning John to the life he once knew.
    Max: To the wilds of the sewer system, silly!
  • "They Came From Down There": While Sam & Max are in sewers, Max points out baby alligators. Sam allows that they may be "buoyant and log-shaped", but, uh, alligators they are not.
    Max: Look, Sam, baby alligators!
    Sam: Well they're buoyant and log-shaped, but far from alligators.
    Max: I don't feel so good...
• Amphibia: One of Marcy's improvements to Newtopia's infrastructure is to stick trash-eating gators in the sewers to keep things running smoothly. Naturally, she and the crew are menaced by one such gator when they have to do down there.
• Archer mentions CHUDs in the "Midnight Ron" episode and Ron thinks the idea of mutants living in the sewers is crap but insists that there are alligators living down there. The idea freaks Archer out due to his phobia about alligators.
  Archer: Ron! C'mon, seriously, at some point I'm gonna have to take a shit, so—
  Ron: So why didn't you go before we left?
  Archer: Not now! In the future! And I won't be able to if I'm thinking about giant alligators rampaging up into my toilet!
  Ron: Talk about tearing you a new one...
• Archie's Weird Mysteries: The Monster of the Week of "It Lives in the Sewers" is a sewer gator that grew to enormous size and started walking on two legs after being exposed to toxic waste. Originally, it was Jughead's pet before Veronica flushed it and he gets the gator to stop before it does any more damage.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Killer Croc generally uses the sewers of Gotham as a hideout and means of stealth travel.
  • "The Underdwellers" has sewer gators in droves. They're actually the Sewer King's pets and they are so loyal that they don't attack him when he falls into their pool.
• The Batman's version of Killer Croc is essentially a crocodile Lizard Man (rather than the human-with-a-skin-condition seen in others) who uses the sewers as his base of operations and plans to flood the city to make looting banks easier. He even has his own pet alligators (though they weren't seen coming along with him to Gotham, so it's possible he managed to tame local sewer gators).
• Ben 10: Alien Force: Ben mentions the possibility of alligators while going into the sewers in "Vengeance of Vilgax, Part 2", which manages to freak Kevin out.
  Ben: Hey, I wonder if there are any alligators down here.
  Kevin: Alligators?
  Ben: Yeah. I heard that people get baby alligators as pets, and flush them down the toilet. They grow gigantic in the sewers!
  Kevin: Maybe I should go up and guard the exit.
  Ben: Ooooohhhh! Big tough Kevin is scared of alligators!
  Gwen: There are no alligators. That's just an urban myth.
  Kevin: Yeah, and we're supposed to be an urban myth too.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: Sewernose de Bergerac from "A Case of Stage Blight" grew obsessed with the opera after being flushed into the sewers beneath a theatre when he was young and is quite insane.
• Creature Comforts: An alligator appears in "Animals in the Hood" who praises her sewer dwelling and dismisses the idea that it could have a dampness problem.
• DuckTales (1987): While searching the sewers in the "A Drain on the Economy" episode, the Beagle Boys dress up as a gator to frighten off the nephews. Then the Beagle Boys run into a real sewer gator.
  Louie: Uh, is it true that alligators live in the sewers?
  Huey: Well, according to the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook- aah!
• El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera: In one episode, while racing through a sewer, Puma Loco, Manny, and Friday, encounter an albino sewer gator.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In "Ruled Out", the Dimmsdale Sewer Gator has 800 teeth and eats anything that moves.
  Timmy: It's violent and educational, but mostly violent! Yay, violence!
• Family Guy:
  • A sewer gator shows up in "No Chris Left Behind", interrupting one of the fights between Peter and Ernie the Giant Chicken. It was not a good idea on the gator's part.
  • At the end of "A House Full of Peters", after a visit from all the children he helped make with a sperm donation, Peter says that all his sperm will now be going into the bathroom sink. The scene then pans down into a sewer full of Peter-like gators and rats. And even a Peter-gator-rat hybrid!
    Peter-Gator-Rat: We have fun down here.
• Freaky Stories: One episode is about a young boy who flushes his pet baby alligator down the toilet because his parents won't let him keep it. As an adult, he encounters the now-grown alligator while he is working in the sewers.
• Futurama: Parodied in "I Second That Emotion" when Bender, Fry and Leela meet a community of Mutants living in the sewers. Fry asks if the legend about sewer gators is true; it isn't, they've only got crocodiles down there. When they grow too large, the mutants flush them into the "sub-sewer".
  Fry: So, is it true that alligators flushed down the toilet survive here?
  Supreme Mutant: No, that's just an urban legend.
  Fry: Then what are those? [gestures to a pool full of them]
  Female Mutant: Crocodiles. [snorts]
  Supreme Mutant: We keep them as pets, then when they grow too large, we flush them down into the sub-sewer.
• Garfield and Friends: In "Attack of the Mutant Guppies", instead of alligators, Garfield claims that unwanted guppies get flushed down the sewer and mutate to gigantic, aggressive monsters (because of sewer chemicals).
• Goof Troop: In "Big City Blues", one of the potential dangers in the city Pete lists off are "croco-gators in the sewers".
• Johnny Test: Johnny and Dukey meet a sewer gator when they're turned into fish and flushed down the toilet in one episode.
• Mr. Bogus: One episode has Bogus and Brattus get eaten by an alligator while they're in the sewer, but escape, before calling on the help of this gator in order to help them stop Ratty, Mole, and a trio of biker rats.
• Ned's Newt: In "Newt York, Newt York", Ned is excited to go to New York City for the weekend because an xylophone note is on sale there, but his parents cancel it after hearing the urban legend that alligators live in the sewers. Ned and Newton go to NYC anyway, and try to "blend in with the locals" until they fall into a manhole by accident that leads to the sewers. Soon they come across a gang of alligators that lived in the sewers ever since their musical on Broadway closed down. They help the alligators find a pipe that leads back to their home in Florida, and one week later Ned finally gets the xylophone note that he wanted.
• The Penguins of Madagascar: Roger is a sewer gator who is good friends with the penguins.
• Phineas and Ferb: Candace fights one in "Fireside Girls Jamboree" to get a "wrestling an alligator in a sewer patch".
  Candace: Alligator, you're goin' down!
• Robot Chicken:
  • In the second DC Comics special, "Villains in Paradise", Captain Cold flushes Starro down the toilet and Brainiac starts complaining.
    Brainiac: You shouldn't flush those things. That's how New York got giant alligators in the sewers.
    Captain Cold: That's just an urban legend.
    Killer Croc: Oh, you think so? [everyone sits awkwardly for a few seconds, not saying a word, as Killer Croc silently walks offscreen]
  • Starro returns while they are at the beach and is bigger than ever.
    Martian Manhunter: It's Starro! Like a mighty New York City sewer alligator!
    Brainiac: I'd hate to say I Told You So. That is a lie. I tol... [Starro crushes him]
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Marge in Chains", a sewer gator appears trapped in the Simpsons toilet — and battling Grampa. The family tried to flush it down the loo, but it got stuck halfway and now they just have to deal with it.
  • In "A Hunka Hunka Burns in Love", while visiting Springfield's Chinatown, Lisa thinks it must be Chinese New Year when the family sees a dragon dance coming down the street. Then some animal control officers tranquilise the "dragon" and take it away.
    Animal Control Guy: People buy them when they're small and cute, then they flush them down the toilet.
  • In "Treehouse of Horror XV - The Ned Zone", Ned gains the ability to foresee people's deaths in a parody of "The Dead Zone". He has a flash of Hans Moleman being eaten alive by alligators and drops him in shock down an open manhole where he is ripped apart by gators.
  • In "A Tree Grows in Springfield", after he falls down an open manhole, Homer tries to get help from an inquisitive alligator that he calls Flushie. According to the label around its neck, Flushie was a gift from Homer to Bart for his 8th birthday.
  • In "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII: Death Tome", since the titular Death Tome forbids using the same metod of death more than once, Lisa starts getting increasingly contrived with her kills, which includes "eaten by gator from a toilet" and later "eaten by lion from a toilet".
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: In most incarnations of the show, Leatherhead is an alligator who ended up in the city sewers and was exposed to the same mutagen as the turtles, resulting in him growing into Lizard Folk and becoming sapient.
• Teen Titans Go!: When Raven returns from being flushed down the toilet in "Animals, It's Just a Word!", she's befriended a mutated sewer gator and sewer rat who help her fight off Cinderblock.
• The Tick: In "The Tick vs. Filth", Tick and Arthur are attacked by giant lobsters in the sewers and Sewer Urchin chases them off with melted butter and lemon.
  Tick: [distressed] What happened? What was that? What is it with the lobsters?
  Sewer Urchin: Sewer lobsters, Tick.
  Tick: I thought there were alligators in the sewer! I mean, I was ready for alligators!
  Sewer Urchin: Ah, no. That's definitely a myth. We got lobsters.
• The Transformers: One episode has a visit to NYC. While we don't see any actual sewer gators, the Autobots encounter a mechanical equivalent... created from Optimus Prime's body, no less. (He got better.)
• Tom and Jerry Tales: After Tom and Jerry drive through the New York sewers in "Joy Riding Jokers", they are more than a little surprised to see that a white alligator somehow managed to get in the car's back seat.
• Total Drama World Tour: Part of the challenge for the "Broadway, Baby" episode involves the teams driving boats from the Statue of Liberty through the sewers to Central Park. While down there, the teams are chased by a giant, white alligator that manages to swallow Team Amazon and their boat whole. The "DJ's First Pet" exclusive clip reveals that the gator was originally DJ's pet that he called Vince and accidentally flushed down the toilet.

Real Life

• In 2023, footage of an alligator found in a drainage pipe was released — although this was in a storm drain, rather than a true sewer.

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