Blanket Fort

Sheldon: Okay, so the final four forts in the first annual best fort ever contest, or Fort-Off, are: Fort Knox, Fort Ticonderoga, Fort Sumter and Fort Cozy McBlanket.
Amy: I'd say, Knox over Ticonderoga, 'cause it's got the gold.
Sheldon: Mm-hmm.
Amy: And McBlanket over Sumter 'cause it has a higher thread count.

— The Big Bang Theory, "The Fortification Implementation"

A classic childhood pastime for many is building a "blanket fort" or "pillow fort" out of pillows, couch cushions, blankets, and other bedding materials to make a sort of "clubhouse" or "secret hangout".

Fort building can be enjoyed by teens and adults, as well. Many parenting books even suggest that parents build one with their children as a bonding tool.

When an adult builds a fort in fiction, it usually illustrates the character is young at heart or Living Out a Childhood Dream.

Compare Kids Prefer Boxes, Treehouse of Fun.

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Examples:

Advertisements

• A Cheetos commercial has Chester Cheetah and an employee build a fort of mattresses.

Comic Strips

• In The Far Side, a man is seen in his fort, but his wife tells him to rebuild it later because she's having guests over and needs the cushions for them.

Fan Works

• A popular piece of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan art has a young Twilight Sparkle make one of these out of books.
• In Tangled Up In You, Marinette and Adrien build one in her room during a sleepover. It's stated that Marinette hasn't made one in ages, while Adrien never has.
• At one point in The RWBY Loops Ruby and Blake have an actual debate over whether a pillow fort is better then a box fort. Yang refuses to get involved, since Ruby's her sister and Blake's her girlfriend, and Weiss torpedoes the argument by suggesting a book fort instead.
• In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, Ponder Stibbons and his Assassin wife Johanna are knucking down to raising a family. The one thing you can be sure about is that the three daughters of a Wizard and an Assassin will be individual and somewhat quirky. Youngest daughter Ruth is a talented musician. Johanna finds herself shaking her head, looking on the three-sided arrangement of banked keyboards in her living room ^note Ruth has been the victim of inspiration particles and is taking a cue from rock keyboards players like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who arranged their instruments in a three-sided square on stage. She gets this sort of leakage from the Roundworld in vivid dreams with full stereo sound.. Johanna reflects that other little girls under ten just build a blanket fort in the living room. Not a Keyboards Redoubt.
• Apex Predator (MHA): Some students of class 1-A build a blanket fort in the classroom. Aizawa, being far more permissive than in canon, lets them do it.

Films — Live-Action

• A creepy scene in The Sixth Sense involved Cole encountering a ghost girl in a blanket fort he built in his room.
• In Miracle Run, Corinne creates one under the table to calm down Steven and Philip after the power shuts off because she forgot to pay the electricity bill.

Literature

• The book Corduroy's Sleepover has the titular bear build a fort.
• If You Give a Pig a Party also features one.
• In the Redwall book Mossflower, a blanket fort is one of the clues: Look up and find the secret is yours, Your castle, your fort, Or so you thought. The series of clues is a note from father to son about how to get to Salamandastron; this part is trying to tell him that the clue is on the underside of a table - when Boar was young, he played under the table, and with the tablecloth there, he always pretended it was a fort or castle. They realize what it means when Boar's daughter, Bella, reminisces about the table and how when she was young she used to pretend she was in a tent.
• In Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea, Will and Rob build "a complicated complex of sea caves for their seal pups, using blankets, tables, model cars, knights in armor, plastic dinosaurs, and a variety of other items seldom observed in the wild by the Seal Conservation Trust but which my sons deemed essential to a baby seal's happiness."
• In Andrew Clements's school story About Average, the main character, Jordan, is great at babysitting and one of her best strategies, especially when dealing with toddlers, is building forts. She's found that you can use just about anything to make one and it really works to keep kids entertained.
• A Boy Made of Blocks: While Alex is babysitting Matt and Clare's kids, they and Sam build a blanket fort that they pretend is a Minecraft house.
• In An Unkindness of Ghosts, Aster and Giselle hide inside one while they work on decrypting Lune Grey's notes.

Live Action TV

• Community:
  • Troy and Abed build an epic blanket fort in "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design", which takes up an entire hallway and is used by Greendale students like a miniature city.
  • In "Pillows and Blankets", Troy and Abed disagree on whether pillows or blankets are the superior fort-building material and each build their own forts, with Abed creating the pillow fort Pillowtown and Troy building the blanket fort Blanketsburg. This disagreement escalates into all out war between the forts, which threatens to destroy Troy and Abed's friendship.
  • "Digital Exploration Of Interior Design" has a subplot about the rivaling Blanket Fort and Pillow Fort of Troy and Abed.
  • Troy and Abed also made a "second bedroom" out of blankets when Annie moved in. They initially gave the fort to Annie, but she got pissed when she discovered that there was an entire unused bedroom that she could have been sleeping in instead, which they were using as a "Dreamatorium." As a compromise, Troy and Abed moved into the blanket fort while Annie got the bedroom they had been using.
• The episode "Restless" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer features "General Surgeon" Riley and Adam as a human building a blanket fort during a security breach in Buffy's dream sequence.
• One recurring segment on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has Stephen and a guest enter a blanket fort and ask each other questions while taking on the mentality of small children.
• Friends: Joey builds a fort out of boxes from furniture. "Why don't you be a man and come watch TV in the fort?"
• The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon becomes upset because he was not invited to a symposium, reminding him of when his brother and sister made forts and never let him in. To cheer him up, Amy suggests he build his own fort, and the two of them spend their first night together playing in Fort Cozy McBlanket.
• Stranger Things: When Mike is hiding Eleven in his basement, he builds her a small fort made out of blankets for her to sleep in. He keeps it up after her disappearance in the season finale, as a sort of Shrine to the Fallen. In Season 2, Mike is shown sitting in the fort while trying to contact Eleven on the walkie-talkie.
• In this Sesame Street YouTube video, Louie gives parents advice on taking a bit of time for themselves while cooped up with their kids during the COVID Pandemic, while his son Elmo shouts in the background for him to come help build a pillow fort.

Music

• From the Katy Perry song "Teenage Dream": "Got a motel and / Built a fort out of sheets".
• From the Lisa Loeb song "Alone": "You do not cheat me of my childhood / You bring me blankets for the walls of my forts".

Puppet Shows

• On The Pajanimals, Apollo and Squacky build a blanket-and-pilllow fort in "Team Fort," though Squacky says at first that they're "building a fork."

Video Games

• In A Hat in Time, Hat Kid herself has one in her bedroom that's explicitly called such in one of the achievements. Though it's technically not a "fort" per se, but is instead a massive pile of pillows haphazardly piled up along one wall that's big enough to swim in, and even includes a diving board on the upper platform, and a secret room of all things at the bottom, the latter of which is required to get the aforementioned achievement.
• In Warframe, looking around Iron Wake^note An outpost of Steel Meridian you can visit after completing the first stage of the quest Chains of Harrow, you can find Clem hiding in a fort made from blunts.
• Alice in Detroit: Become Human has a fort made of curtains and boxes in the corner of her bedroom.

Web Comics

• Most major characters in Problem Sleuth build a fort out of whatever they have on hand at some point or another.
• This xkcd strip discusses the emotional aspect of building one.
• Mandatory Roller Coaster presents an adult modification of the blanket fort here.
• Dominic Deegan: Dominic's brother Gregory is fond of making couch fortresses when he needs to sleep over at a place. Their father Donovan took over Greg's fort once when he was Exiled to the Couch, suggesting Greg picked up the habit from him.
• This Breaking Cat News strip demonstrates that blanket forts can be just as enjoyable for cats as they are for children.

Web Original

• The comic meme Dog Fort features a number of costumed dogs being portrayed as a sort of Lighter and Softer pseudo-military operation, all connected through a central command unit which consists of a golden retriever in a pillow fort, reporting as the eponymous Dog Fort.

Western Animation

• In the 101 Dalmatian Street Short; "Merry Pups", Dylan constructs a Watch Tower using the presents around the Christmas Tree.
• On King of the Hill, Hank and his buddies go on a road trip to a fancy hotel. Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer build a fort, of course.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "The Last Temptation of Homer", when Homer goes to Capital City with Mindy to attend an energy convention, the bellhop assumes that Homer & Mindy will be getting it on.
    Bellhop: TV's there...bathroom's there...and there's your king-size bed for...[wolf-whistles, makes a cat noise, imitates a bed squeaking, purrs, pants, barks, howls, twiddles his lips] Hubba hubba!
    Homer: Stop that! I love my wife and family. All I'm gonna use this bed for is sleeping, eating, and maybe building a little fort.
  • In another episode, Bart & Lisa use a bunch of UPS boxes to build a giant fort in the backyard. The UPS guy complains that they're wasting the boxes, and eventually brings in a bunch of other UPS guys to wage battle against them.
• Family Guy:
  • One episode has Peter building a fort out of pillows on an airplane (complete with "No Girls Allowed" sign).
  • Another one has Stewie making a fort out of Brian's failed novel "Faster Than The Speed of Love".
    Stewie: My house is made of mediocrity.
• BMO and Jake build one in the Adventure Time episode "Puhoy", which Finn crawls through and leads him to a world made of pillows. Then Finn gets lost in the pillow world, finds a pillow-woman, settles down with her to start a family, has pillow-children, grows old, and finally dies...only to wake up back in Ooo to realize it was All Just a Dream.
• In Teen Titans Go!, the team decides to hold a slumber party to help Cyborg get over his fear of the dark. Robin suggests they build a blanket fort, and everyone agrees, until they remember it's Robin and his blueprints require two hours just to lay the foundation so he does it himself. It has several floors, guest bedrooms, a bowling alley, artwork, and who knows what else.
• Captain Hero's "Pillow Fort of Solitude" from the Drawn Together episode "Terms of Endearment".
• One of these is actually key to the plot in "Remember the Pillow Fort" from Dragon Tales. Max and Ord agree to build one together, but then get into an argument over what color the pillows should be.
• In "Thumbelina's Wild Ride" from Disney Junior's Goldie & Bear, Thumbelina builds one with Goldie and Bear when babysitting them. It's actually pretty posh.
• In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode, "The Blanket Fort", Piggy and Summer build an entire blanket kingdom.
• Archer: In one episode the ISIS staff start slacking off while Malory is away. Krieger uses some boxes filled with the paperwork they're supposed to be doing to build "Fort Kick-Ass".
• Bluey: 'Cubby' has the girls making this as the premise, but as they begin adding new rooms into it, during the episode's climax it ended up becoming a blanket mansion, spanning the entire living room. Naturally, the climax in question is them (and their dad) getting lost in the many rooms of said fort.

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