Spider Tank - TV Tropes

Artemus Gordon: So, what does Loveless have? [notices factory complex] Well... he has his own city.
[Out of nowhere, a giant mechanical spider shows up]
Jim West: He has an 80-foot tarantula.
Artemus Gordon: Yes, well... I was coming to that.

• AKIRA: Small, four-legged spider tanks appear to enforce martial law after Tetsuo releases Akira.
• Appleseed: Spider Gun Platforms. The fourth volume of the manga also features smaller Attack Drone robots with actual abdomens that are almost entirely made up of a minigun and its absurdly large ammo drum.
• Bubblegum Crisis: The GD-42 Battlemover, the "crab mech" piloted by Vision.
• Cyborg 009 has Monster of the Week Cyborg 0011, whose body is basically one such tank, with lasers, a cannon that shot a sticky substance and a missile that, when exploded, unleashes a neurotoxic rain.
• Dominion Tank Police has a spider tank in one episode, albeit an opponent for the more normal looking tanks of the Tank Police.
• In Fairy Tail, the true form of the ancient Reversal Magic Nirvana is the fantasy equivalent of this trope. In other words, a city-sized stone construct that walks on six legs that fires its Magic through a Wave-Motion Gun. The heroes are suitably shocked to realize this, having originally assumed Nirvana was some sort of ancient spell or even small artifact.
• In Fang of the Sun Dougram, the spider tanks are improved model of the Walking Tank Crab Gunner and Tequila Gunner. They have a lower profile, are more mobile than their predecessor, and come in two forms, a six-legged Desert Gunner and a smaller four-legged Blizzard Gunner.
• Genesis of Aquarion: In the second to last episode, we find out that the Assault Type Aquarion can assume an "Armageddon Formation" where all three vectors combine into a six-legged mech with the PSG cannon mounted on the top.
• Ghost in the Shell: Fuchikomas, Tachikomas, Uchikomas, and just about half the tanks. They all have wheels or treads on their legs, save for one example from the first movie.
  • Fuchikomas and Tachikomas have more spider-like traits than usual, being able to cling to walls and deploy wires that let them swing around or descend vertical heights. The Tachikomatic Days omake points out◊ they're like Spider-Man in tank form.
  • In a clever extension of this Animal Motif, Jigabachi attack helicopters resemble wasps (they rear back their abdomens to fire a minigun at their target) and are named for a type that hunts spiders.

    Tachikoma 1: [worried about an impending confrontation with several Jigabachi] So, wouldn't anti-tank helicopters be like... our natural predator?
    Tachikoma 2: Hmmm... Mister Batou, can we go home? We have upset stomachs.
    Batou: Stomachs? What stomachs?

  • One early episode features the military prototype with more of a scorpion theme. It's possessed by its designer so he can protest his parents' decision not to allow him to get a healthy body via cyborgization.
• Gundam:
  • Although the Adzam Mobile Armor in Mobile Suit Gundam is more like a hovering gun platform with four landing gear, the Zamza-Zah from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny actually has fully jointed legs (with retractable crab claws and BFGs in the feet), though it also spends most of its appearances flying. Destiny also has the Ghells-Ghe, which is an insect-like armor with the upper body of a mobile suit mounted centaur-like on the front.
  • A brief scene of a heavily modified Ball known as Polypodball appears in Gundam Build Divers. This Ball variant is somewhat octopoid, with a round central hull and four legs at the corners in place of the thruster packs that would normally be mounted. However, it also retains the Ball's manipulator pinchers pointing forward, giving it a look rather similar to a crab.
• Gyo: Infected fish (and later, other animals and even humans) ride around on nightmarish metal walking machines constructed by the Death Stench bacteria. The tips of their spindly metal legs are incredibly sharp, being able to badly wound anyone touched by them, and if a vacant walking machine is touched by something, it impales its victim with a set of spikes and tubes to use the unfortunate soul as its latest 'energy source'. One of the first organisms to appear attached to such a walking machine is a Great White Shark (a shark tank, if you will), which appears to be conscious enough to still menace and attack anyone caught in its path.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: The Type IV Gadget Drones. Fast and deadly Mecha-Mooks with six sickle-legs that slice through Barrier Jackets and Knight Armors like butter. The manga also showed experimental versions of Type III Gadget Drones (those big ball things) that were six-legged walking tanks.
• Metallic Rouge: One of the weapons used by the Usurpers in the Great Offscreen War were four-legged autonomous war machines humans nicknamed "Cylinder Heads". They're fast and armed with clawed legs, retractible arms, and a powerful rotary laser cannon.
• Patlabor: A couple of spider mechs appear, including one for traffic police, one that's supposed to be a luxury civilian vehicle, and a third one being a mobile command post used by United Nations forces. All three of them have wheels on the ends of their "legs".
• Project A-Ko: The alien forces use a spider-tank that also doubles as an aerial fighter.
• In Soul Eater, this is what Baba Yaga Castle (no actual relationship to Baba Yaga, it's the headquarters of the witch Arachne) can become: a giant spider castle tank.
• In Sound of the Sky, the 1121st Platoon has a Takemikazuchi dating to the Old Era. It's an impressive machine, able to scale buildings. It spends most of the series in pieces, but Noël manages to fix it in time to save the day. To put that feat in perspective, it's a supermodern piece of precision machinery, and she repairs it with the equivalent of a mix of 19th Century and 1930s technology. Gadgeteer Genius indeed.
  • The flashbacks show that both armies use large numbers of spider tanks, but their capabilities are far less than the Takemikazuchi's, in imitation of which they appear to have been built.
  • All the tanks seen in action are spider-tanks, but the Takemicaduchi is the most advanced tank ever built, a piece of Lost Technology.
• Time Bokan: All mecha are animal-shaped, from the insect-shaped robots used by the heroes to the assorted robots used by the Skull Trio.
• Zoids: There are a number of Scorpion-, Crab- and Insect-based Zoids, notably the Death Stinger.

• In Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, Lex Luthor's underwater secret lab is a giant mecha supported by spider legs.
• In the Ravencroft miniseries, as one of Wilson Fisk's cronies hired to Ravencroft asylum, Mac Gargan is given an Alister Smythe-designed bionic, long-legged, arachnoid wheelchair that has a tail cannon with the usual arsenal of Scorpion weaponry.

• Aeon Entelechy Evangelion: The Nephilim Tsuchigumos replace the useless canon CthulhuTech Nephilim. And yes, they are a Shout-Out to Tachikomas.
• Exoria: Anansi. Twenty-five meters tall. Carries ten chain guns and dozens of anti-tank top-attack missiles. Runs at three hundred kilometers per hour. Impervious to most conventional weapons. Can jump.
• Left Beyond: The Omega spend a significant amount of resources developing spider tanks... which turn out to be nigh useless, since the Millennial Earth has no mountains.
• Nobody Dies: Go-Kun, but more classically the Reego (or some of their bodies, at least). Tres even has most of the semi-sentient giant spiders in Australia worshiping her. (Long story.)
• Turn of the Tides: The preview for the Bloodbath of the Burning Plains reveals Sergeant Johnson will pilot a Scarab.
• Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: Dyna's steam-powered life-support exo-armor is described as a barrel-shaped, upright torso mounted on eight piston-powered mechanical spider's legs. For an added arachnid aesthetic, her primary right arm ends in a piston-powered scorpion-like pincer with a retractile chainsaw mounted to it.

• Beauty and the Beast (1991): Once Belle has agreed to become the Beast's prisoner in exchange for the freedom of her father Maurice, the Beast drags Maurice to an old palanquin of the "small carriage-like box on bearing poles" variety. Having been touched by the same magic as the rest of the castle, once the Beast has placed Maurice inside and ordered it to take him back to the village, the palanquin's poles curl into spidery legs and it rapidly scuttles off through the forest, carrying the protesting Maurice with it.
• In The Boxtrolls, Snatcher builds one, with the help of captured boxtrolls, to break into the boxtroll lair and round up the rest.
• Howl's Moving Castle: The titular castle is something of a Steampunk version, moving around on four jointed legs.
• The Incredibles: Syndrome's Omnidroid. Early versions had two wheels and two arms, but at some point they were mixed together and just kept increasing from there until you get the five- and six- legged, building-sized monstrosities that are actually fought.
• In Megamind: The Button of Doom, having become defender of Metrocity after the end of the movie, Megamind auctions off his evil weapons, but Minion is fond of the Spider-bot and hides it instead. Then a Humongous Mecha attacks and Megamind has nothing to fend it off with; its spider-like nature comes in useful for a Colossus Climb.
• Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva has the entire castle be built upon a huge excavator.
• Steamboy: A walking steam tank is shown for only one scene, being used by the O'Hara foundation when fighting the British military's treaded tanks.
• Strike Witches: The beginning of the movie features an entire legion of Neuroi Spider Tanks, one of few land-based Neuroi featured in the series.
• Toy Story: One of the rebuilt toys is a toy car with legs instead of wheels. The baby doll / erector set hybrid is also Spider Tank shaped.
• War of the Worlds: Goliath: In 1914, humans have reverse-engineered the Martian Tripods to create their own Battle Tripods, which carry mostly human weapons such as an 88mm cannon, machine guns, a few rockets plus they also have a heat ray. World War I is about to be fought with these Battle Tripods (plus some lesser Diesel Punk technologies) until the Martians invade again.

• In Avatar: The Way of Water, the whaling crew of the RDA uses crab-shaped amphibious submarines that have pincers and move on land like crabs would.
• Comic Book: The Movie: Kevin Smith relates (based on his experience with Superman Returns above, then called Superman Lives) how the director of the movie Hammill's character is making a featurette on (with the ulterior motive to gain control of the production to prevent Adaptation Displacement) wanted him to write a scene where the hero fights a giant mechanical spider. At the turning point of the film his realization that the movie must be stopped is conveyed by having him obtain a copy of the shooting script and discovering the words "Scene 37: The Giant Mechanical Spider".
• Doctor Who: One of the rejected designs for The Movie has a spider Dalek that can unfold its side casing into eight legs. Great, now even stairs won't stop them ^note . Spider Daleks made it into at least one of the novels, both in Dalek-sized and tank-sized varieties.
• Ghost in the Shell (2017). After his assassins prove ineffectual against Section 9, Cutter uses a missile-firing spider tank against Major and Kuze. Unlike the one in the anime, it's a remotely-piloted drone.
• In the climactic scene of I Am Mother, a robot version is brought up by the Killer Robots to burn its way into the bunker.
• Justice League sees Batman briefly employing a tank with spider-like legs called "the Knightcrawler" to use against Steppenwolf in the tunnels. In fact, this vehicle can even scale walls.
• Minority Report has small drone robots for police searches.
• Robot Wars (1993) has the last remaining Humongous Mecha in the world called MRAS-2 that looks like a scorpion (the sting is a powerful laser cannon). At the start of the film, its purpose is to ferry tourists in the passenger module on its back. Then it's hijacked by a representative of the Eastern Alliance in order to make war. The hero (the pilot of the MRAS-2) manages to find another Humongous Mecha, which was thought destroyed in the war. The MEGA-1 is humanoid in form, though. Oh, did we mention that it was made by the same people who brought us Robot Jox (it was even hyped as a sequel).
• Star Wars: The AT-TE and (large and small) Spider Droids from the prequel trilogy. The AT-TE is a squat tank-like machine that moves on six spread-out legs for stability and can climb up vertical cliffs. The spider droids are spherical robots with four jointed legs arranged equidistantly around their midsections and powerful laser guns mounted on their fronts (the small ones) or undersides (the large ones), making them essentially ambulatory cannon emplacements.
  • The original trilogy's AT-ATs sort of qualify based on leg count, but ultimately they're less Spider Tanks and more Indricotherium Tanks. Elephant tanks, rather, as the AT-AT leg design and movements were based on elephants walking.
  • In the Expanded Universe, the MT-AT — designed specifically for mountainous terrain — is distinctly more spiderlike in its design.
• Terminator Genisys: Skynet has these defending the base where it's hiding the time machine. They are able to be deployed from the flying Hunter Killers and are quite formidable — only the destruction of Skynet stops John and Reese from being killed by one.
• Wild Wild West: The giant Steampunk spider built and used by Dr. Arliss Loveless.
  • Producer Jon Peters repeatedly insisted a similar spider tank show up in early drafts of what later became Superman Returns, as wittily recounted here by scriptwriter Kevin Smith. It also shows up in Superman: Doomsday, and an animated Smith observes it and calls it "lame".
  • Jon Peters' obsession with the vehicle goes beyond just those two movies. The most egregious example might be his attempt to fit the contraption into the proposed cinematic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (1989) series.

• 86 -EIGHTY SIX- has these as one of the centerpieces of the setting.
• The Bull's Hour features the nine-legged SDF robots utilized by the main cast. These multipods can do basically whatever the plot needs them to do, probably justified by the fact this is an expedition to an unknown and possibly hostile world, coupled with the ability of the Earth's mighty scientific-industry complex to actually load a small robot with every feature the designers could imagine. Unfortunately, their lack of an anti-naivete warning system still left half of the Dark Flame's crew outright dead, and the rest traumatized for the comparatively short rest of their lives — not that the impregnable encounter suits or the commander's dreaded Inferno training helped much, either.
• Done literally in the third Burton & Swinburne Series book, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon. During the World War, British scientists raised giant daddy longlegs and had them killed. They then motorized and armored the corpses before finally adding gun emplacements to make a powerful tank out of them.
• Dinotopia: First Flight, set during the golden age of the mech-loving civilization of Poseidos, has a variety of spider-like strutters. Unlike most other examples, they actually have flat, padded feet.
• A civilian version, more properly described as an Insect Car, occurs in Die entflohene Blume ("The Escapee Flower", 1910) by Kurd Laßwitz. Here the Martian girl Ha and her brother Hei reach a remote desert valley by using a six-legged Kletter-Auto ("climbing-car") which by the use of suction-devices in its feet can even climb up sheer cliffs "like a wasp".
• The Fallen World: Alexandra developed a giant robot spider to be her new first-floor boss. The original version had a giant crossbow on its back. She started developing more variants to use as elite mooks, some equipped with firearms. One was given to the local Baroness as a gift/bodyguard. She also made a forklift version for cargo.
• Gaunt's Ghosts": The Chaos forces opposing the Sabbat Worlds Crusade deploy the dreaded "Stalk Tank", a muti-legged assault vehicle that resembles a spider or mantis, piloted by a single soldier. The vehicle is designed to be small and nimble enough to provide mobile support to infantry, especially in urban environments, rather that engage enemy armored vehicles. Some versions carry the enemy's battle-psychics.
• For civilian purposes in K. W. Jeter's Fiendish Schemes, Steampunk technology has led to the Walking Lighthouse. These are lighthouses with a retractable crabwalker base that allows a lighthouse to move to a new location before deploying back to being a normal lighthouse. The reason for this invention is that it turns out the oceans are Genius Loci and can move or change shape, making stationary lighthouses almost useless.
• Heavy Object: Deconstructed. Some Objects like the Water Strider have their hovering devices at the end of several long legs. The fact that the legs are extremely maintenance-intensive is a plot point: Qwenthur is able to destroy Water Strider by sabotaging one of the parts that have to be replaced after every sortie.
• In the Jedi Academy Trilogy, a group of Imperial loyalists breaks out the MT-AT (Mountainous Terrain Armored Transport), an eight-legged spider-tank designed for high and rough terrain. Each leg has its own laser cannon.
• KonoSuba: The Mobile Fortress Destroyer is literally a colossal robot spider that destroys everything in its path.
• Leviathan: Most motorized vehicles use legs instead of wheels on the assumption that they are either more efficient, powerful, or adaptable. In truth, the sheer complexity of a walking vehicle would would have a staggering cost and inefficiency compared to wheels.
  • The Land Frigates are essentially warships mounted on six or eight mechanical legs. A Scorpion Tank belonging to the Ottomans shows up in Behemoth.
  • At one point in the first volume, Alek considers alternative propulsion and immediately rejects tracks as being fit only for peasant tractors.
• In Ollie's Odyssey, Zozo makes one of these out of parts of the various rides around the amusement park.
• In Neal Asher's The Owner trilogy, Spiderguns are the ultimate in squad suppression. This agile 8-legged armored arsenal has a dual-barreled machine gun turret on each leg for the basic model (other weapons can be added on). While the guns are small caliber, they fire at 1000 rounds per minute at 4000 meters per second and all 8 guns can fix on the same target for More Dakka Alpha Strike. And the ammo it uses is Depleted Uranium beads and every spidergun leg magazine has 2000 of these. One spidergun can easily wipe out dozens of enemy infantry in seconds.
• Rebuild World: This is one of the most common monster designs, ranging from small enough to crawl over Akira's Cool Car, to Kaiju. Like the other monsters, all of which are The Remnant of Neglectful Precursors called the Old World, they devour metal to resupply, grow, and reproduce. Additionally, the Super-Soldier Haruka is able to use Voluntary Shapeshifting to split herself into many of these, with spiders being her Animal Motif. All of the above fantastic abilities come from Nanomachines.
• Takeshi Kovacs: Altered Carbon and Broken Angels don't feature Spider Tanks directly, but they are mentioned by various characters. They (and various other robotic war-machines) finally make an appearance in Woken Furies.
• Valhalla: Sasha's entire fleet is made up of walking tanks with four legs and a walking aircraft carrier with eight. These are given purpose in the novel; they need legs to tiptoe across forests that wheeled vehicles couldn't enter. One tank is modified to have eight legs partly in reference to Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse in Norse Mythology.
• The War Against the Chtorr has four-meter-high Vigilante-class military spiders. Unfortunately, they're not that smart, which causes the hero any number of problems.
• In addition to the Tripod Terror, the Martians from The War of the Worlds have the Handling Machine, described as a squat, metallic spider with huge articulated claws. The Martians used it for construction purposes.

• The Book of Boba Fett. In the climatic battle of Season One, our anti-heroes seem to have the Pyke Syndicate soldiers on the run, when a couple of Scorpenek Annihilator droids protected by their own forcefields turn up. Even though Boba turns up riding a giant rancor to fight them, they still take a lot of killing.
• Enlisted: Lt. Shneeberger pilots a robot spider in one episode.
• Stargate SG-1: The Replicators initially take the shape of small metallic spiders. In later episodes, they combine to form larger insectoid shapes, fully fulfilling this trope.

• Foo Fighters (2023): Many of the Overlord's personally-controlled robots have multiple spider-like legs, ranging from three to six depending on the mode.

• BattleTech: Four-legged ("quad") BattleMechs are a distinct minority, but they do exist. Their main in-game drawbacks are their lack of arms and more rigid firing arcs (partly due to lack of a twistable upper torso) — in particular, the construction rules don't allow for weapons covering their side arcs at all, thus creating significant blind spots. On the plus side, they get minor maneuvering benefits and are less likely to fall down as long as all legs are still working. The first two Quad mechs, the Scorpion and Goliath, are based off Dougram's Blizzard Gunner and Crab Gunner respectively.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Apparatus of Kwalish, an item from the first edition of the game which returns as a standard (if expensive) magic item in 4th edition, is a barrel in which a person can hide himself. Multiple levers allow one to turn the barrel into a Spider Tank (complete with flamethrowers) and control it. It's primarily meant for underwater use, complete with glowing "eyes" with continual light cast on them and retractable claws in the front. Although the item would be invaluable as a Spider Tank if found at low levels, its value is such that (barring deliberate placement by a GM) it can usually only be found in treasures long after the characters would have no use for its combat or amphibious capabilities.
  • Lolth uses a giant version of one of these as her headquarters in Queen of the Demonweb Pits.
  • Spelljammer: The neogi use arachnid-shaped spaceships, some of which are well-armored enough to rate as spacegoing Spider Tanks.
  • The retriever is a construct (robot-like animated object) from the Abyss, used to perform certain missions for the demon lords. There is speculation that it was modeled after the spider-like Abyssal predators known as bebiliths.
• Dystopian Wars loves this — not only do the Empire of the Blazing Sun have one (the Taka-Ishi Heavy Walker), but the Covenant of Antrartica's small and medium tanks are quadroped walkers as well. Their Landship however is far from a Spider, but also worthy of inclusion here.
• GURPS Ultratech has the Exo-Spider.
• Iron Kingdoms: Though not strictly tanks, the Leviathan and Harrower helljacks from Warmachine qualify well enough for this trope. There's also a Cygnar Battle Engine called the Storm Strider, a four-legged machine that blasts its targets with lightning.
• Lancer: The SSC Death's Head and Swallowtail frames fit this trope, each having several pairs of legs and an upper body that resembles a turret more than a humanoid torso. They both even feature small manipulator arms that resemble pedipalps. The approach is markedly unusual for SSC, who usually make mechs so humanoid they even have Humanlike Foot Anatomy.
• Marvel Super Heroes supplement Uncanny X-Men boxed set "Adventure Book". In chapter 2 "Lunch Break", while the Player Characters are eating lunch with the Beast they're attacked by a tank that has a circular body and eight spider-like legs with six 12-foot long Combat Tentacles. It turns out to be a Secret Test arranged by the Beast to find out if the Player Characters are worthy to be superheroes.
• Mobile Frame Zero has the Ijad, who favour a low, rounded, quadrupedal structure since their most common combat hosts are quadrupeds, although they're not shy about using humanoid mechs when the pilot has a human partner. The corebook has LEGO assembly instructions for the generic modular Scrambler and the assault/recon Suzerain, both of them insectoid quadrupeds.
• Paranoia: The MTV (Multi-Terrain Vehicle) in the sample adventure for the second edition. Perhaps unique in being based on a submarine with legs bolted in place. (Incidentally, the manual control system consists of six joysticks, and is about as reliable and intuitive as learning to play the piano with your knees. The MTV's bot brain can handle it just fine, but of course it conks out after a while...)^note 
• In addition to inheriting some of the examples from D&D, Pathfinder includes the powerful Annihilator Robots, found in and around the massive crashed starship in Numeria. Equipped with chain guns and a Plasma Cannon, they are formidable adversaries, though thankfully rare.
• Rifts has both Spider and Scorpion Skull-Walkers for the Coalition States — essentially giant metal skulls on six jointed legs (yes, we know spiders have eight legs) — and the four-legged Bug and Land Crab APCs for the New German Republic.
• In Rocket Age the Nazis are the only ones to have been able to reverse engineer Ancient Martian war walkers. Several war walkers fit this trope, but the best examples are the Sturmschreiter, an eight legged behemoth, and the Panzerschreiter Skorpion, an agile six legged contraption built for city fighting.
• Starblazer Adventures, campaign setting Mindjammer. The enemy Venu forces have attack droids that are spider-shaped robots. They can climb walls like a spider and are adept in zero G environments. They are armed with a Protein Disruptor Cannon and protected by primitive force fields.
• Traveller Classic supplement RM-90-08 Imperial Armed Forces Vehicle Guide Set Number 8 - Exotic. The XM-125 is a tank that moves using its eight legs. The legs allow it to move over almost any type of solid terrain, including crossing ditches, fording rivers, passing over obstacles and climbing slopes of up to 60°.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Chaos faction loves this trope. There's the Defiler (demon possessed mech with four legs and two clawed arms), the Brass Scorpion, a giant mechanical demonic scorpion used by the forces of Khorne, and the Soul Grinder, which is basically a demon bolted onto a Defiler's legs. Also note the new "Blood Slaughterer". Their newest codex also gave them the Venomcrawler, a spider-formed daemon engine.
  • The 5th edition Necrons Codex introduces the Triarch Stalker, although it's only six-legged.
  • The Imperium has access to the Adeptus Mechanicus Onager Dunecrawler, which has optional pads to place on the feet to get around the "pointy ballerina feet" issue.

• In gen:LOCK, the heavy infantry for the Union are black and gold spider tanks armed with grappling hooks, twin machine guns, and a powerful rotary cannon.
• RWBY: The third trailer included a small Spider Tank amongst many humanoid robotic Mooks. The tank puts up a much better fight than the mooks, and the Action Girl protagonist can't even scratch it; she can only buy time for her partner to prepare his One-Hit Kill attack.

• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: In the 3rd episode, while Chip, Dale, Monterey Jack and Zipper look for Geegaw Hackwrench in an abandoned airplane, they manage to trigger traps that were set, and run into a spider-like mecha, which turns out to have Gadget inside, who comes out to greet Monterey.
• The Dreamstone: Some of Urpgor's machines are variations of this. Perhaps the most notable being the literal Spider Tank in "The Spidermobile", to the point of being designed like a spider and even shooting web as a weapon.
• Futurama: In "A Taste of Freedom", after conquering the Earth, the Decapodians force humanity to build a crab tank — the "Mobile Oppression Palace", essentially a gigantic sandcastle on six orange mechanical legs and provided with a pair of crab-like claws — to watch over their new conquest.
• Jonny Quest: In "The Robot Spy", the titular device was a globe with a single large eye set in it, with four long legs sticking out of the top. It was invulnerable to firearms up to and including a tank's main gun.
• Phineas and Ferb has Professor Poofenplotz's "Me-Mobile" from "Isabella and the Temple of Sap", a giant version of her head mounted on spider legs.
• Shadow Raiders: Planet Ice's Spider Tanks (They're called exactly that).
• The Simpsons: "The Sweetest Apu" parodies the Wild Wild West spider tank when Skinner tries to maintain realism in a Civil War re-enactment, despite the interruption from some nearby World War II veterans...

  Skinner: Tanks? Oh, this is just too inaccurate.
  [Professor Frink appears behind him in a giant robot spider.]
  Professor Frink: Well then, you're definitely not going to like my steam-powered super-spider. With the stepping and the squishing and the webs made of NYLON...

• Skyland: The MOGURA is a large spider-shaped robot that was created to drill for water on an ice-covered block. Once the water ran out, though, it needed to find more sources. As it happens, humans are largely water...
• South Park sends up the Wild Wild West Spider Tank^note  when Cartman pretends to be a rapping cowboy who has to save Salma Hayek from a big metal spider.
• Spider-Man (1967): One episode features a world in another dimension (during the series' really weird later seasons) where an evil alien sends giant spider-shaped mechas, that shoot paralyzing/freezing rays, to attack and tear apart a human city and abduct its people to use as slave labor.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: The Spider-Slayers (a black widow, a tarantula and a scorpion) double up as Combining Mecha. And none of them was original to the series. There have been a lot of Spider-Slayer designs in the comics.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars has the Umbaran juggernaut, a six-legged dome-shaped tank armed with a rotary cannon and employed by the Umbaran forces. This one, notably, does not walk on tip-toes — it rests on its "knuckles" instead.
• Totally Spies!: In "Spy vs Spy", the protagonists end up tied in a giant web. A large spider robot crawls over them and sprays them with a liquid material which hardens into a cocoon. Clover breaks them out with liquid nitrogen breath spray applied to the cocoons.
• Transformers: A small number of Transformers turn into giant spiders, either mechanical or organic. Tarantulas is the first and most unnerving, and his personality goes far beyond vague malevolence right on into psychosis. Scorponok in both his G1, Energon and Movie incarnations. He's closer to Tank/Scorpion hybrid than most.
• The Venture Bros. parodies Jonny Quest's Spider Tank with Dr. Venture's obsession over his father's Walking Eye.
• Wolverine and the X-Men (2009): The first Sentinel prototype was of a spider/scorpion form. It had some kinks to work out, like not knowing how to avoid collateral damage, and not having an off-switch.
• In Young Justice (2010), the Kroloteans have "mechs" that are Spider Tanks in all but name.

• Actual vehicles have been built that use the motor configuration of arachnids. However, they move much slower than just using wheels.
• Big Dog (from Boston Dynamics) may not be a vehicle, but just you wait. Also LS3, the (also canceled) bigger brother.
• Speaking of walking on soft ground...the Timberjack hexapod deforester which can walk on uneven ground effectively (albeit has very slow turning) is proudly claiming that its feet cause less damage to ground when compare to a normal caterpillar. What kind of magic it use? Rubber dampers.
• And that's why the cheap robots they're designing to wander Mars are called 'spider-bots'. They only have six legs, though. And they're kinda small. And there will be a lot of them. They're cheap, after all.
• The Kabutom RX-03, which took 11 years to build, is 11 meters long, 9.5 meters wide, weighs 15 tonnes and carries up to 6 people. Admittedly, it actually has wheels underneath which bear its weight, and the legs simply push it along.
• La Princesse is a giant mechanical spider, but it's supported by a crane. The legs are just for show.
• A bunch of people at the University of Louisiana created the Cajun Crawler, which is basically a Segway only with little legs (based off of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests) instead of wheels. The result is one part Nightmare Fuel, and two parts awesome.
• NASA's ATHLETE (TOW link) project probably applies. They're six-limbed robots/transportation platforms with wheels on the end of each limb, giving them the ability to walk or roll depending on the situation. The "walking" is rather slow, and often consists of "moving the limbs in such a way that we can roll safely again," as each footfall must be human controlled; NASA is working on "autonomous footfall placement" in part to make walking faster. The end goal of the project is to create a robot to carry cargo on the Moon.
• Mondo Spider. See also on YouTube. So far, it didn't surpass human walking speed, but yes, it turns on the spot. "1,700 lbs of Mechanical Mayhem" is moved by hydraulics powered with 12hp average (30hp peak) worth of electrical motors.
• The Crabster. If build it could revolutionize undersea exploration by giving it more dexterity exploring the ocean floor and hardiness in the face of aggressive currents.