trip and has bought Alan a present for his birthday – a pygmy alligator. Production The episode was partly inspired by H. G. Wells' 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth and its theme of animal size change. Another influence was the 1927 film The Cat and the Canary and its 1939 re-make, both of which feature haunted house premises and stalker characters. Writer Alan Pattillo, who according to special effects supervisor Derek Meddings "had tried to come up with the most nightmarish rescue situation he could", had wanted to direct the episode as well. Ultimately, however, it was directed by David Lane. The opening scene features an insert shot of a stormy sky that was later used to introduce the opening titles of The Prisoner. "Attack of the Alligators!" was filmed in October and November 1965. The production overran its month-long schedule, forcing the crew to work extra hours, and sometimes long into the night, to complete the filming. Special effects assistant Ian Wingrove remembered that the episode's complex technical aspects had the crew "[working] day and night ... through a weekend". According to Lane, at one stage the shoot ran for 48 hours straight, with two editors processing the footage in shifts. He added: "I think Derek [Meddings] went three days, non-stop, just shooting." The alligators in the episode were portrayed not by actual alligators, as Gerry Anderson had originally intended, but by juvenile crocodiles. These were acquired from a private zoo in the north of England to double as the enlarged alligators on the episode's scale sets and water tanks. The crocodiles that appear in the episode were long; a larger specimen, measuring , was not used as it was too aggressive to be taken out of its box. The crew kept the water tanks heated to a suitably warm temperature and used electric shocks to coax movement out of the crocodiles. The animals were unpredictable and difficult to control, either basking in the heat of the studio lights or disappearing into the tanks for hours at a time. To make them more visible to the cameras, the crew attached them to guiding rods and co-ordinated their movements. The use of live animals in both puppet and scale model shots required an unusually close collaboration between the puppet and effects crews. Effects director Brian Johnson and several other crew members boycotted