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Ron Stoppable: "Have we been in this lair before?"
Every up-and-coming Super Villain aspires to create a particularly cool Supervillain Lair. It may be an Elaborate Underground Base, an old castle (preferably atop a craggy mountain peak in the middle of nowhere surrounded by a perpetual lightning storm), an underwater complex, a space station, or a corporate office building, among other possibilities, but if you really want to be a cut above lesser villainous contemporaries you make it a floating fortress or an Air Borne Aircraft Carrier. It will generally be stocked with most or all of the following:
The more elaborate the digs, and the more time spent dwelling on them, the more likely that the heroes will end up paying them a visit and exposing some important architectural flaws.
Examples:
- Nearly every James Bond film ever made.
- Lots of series set in The DCU.
- Kim Possible has a lot of fun with this one. Most notable, in one episode Dr. Drakken builds a lair in the "World's Largest Cheese Wheel"; which, we are reminded several times, is not a cheese-covered building, but is in fact 100 percent Wisconsin swiss.
- Then, of course, there's Seņor Seņor Sr., who only became a villain after Ron pointed out that his home was already half way to being a lair.
- Totally Spies.
- The Initiative from the fourth season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
- The offices of Wolfram and Hart in Angel.
- Brilliantly spoofed, along with the rest of James Bond, in an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
- Videogame example: Impossible Mission, by Epyx.
- The original Metal Gear game that spawned the Metal Gear Solid series.
- Spoofed to death in the Austin Powers series of movies.
- Spoofed relentlessly in the game Totally Renamed Spy Game by Cheapass Games (formerly known as "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond").
- The entire basis of the game Evil Genius is to build a lair - twice - get the money, minions and henchmen you need to defeat the Super Spies, and successfully Take Over The World - all done in a cheesy 1960's-style way. Great fun if you're into that kind of thing.
- This map
 from Casey and Andy pretty much sums it up.
- In the highly acclaimed "Dreamcatcher" custom module for the original Neverwinter Nights, the following exchange dialogue option occurs between the player and a kobold minion, in a secret lair on the ocean floor:
[PC]: "Why is it that villains always go for the underwater secret base?"
Krunk the Kobold: "Krunk doesn't know, but he did have a previous master who had a secret volcano base. The sulfur hurt Krunk's sinuses."
- The White Star in both Super Robot Wars Original Generation and Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2
- While it rarely dwelt very long on any of them, nearly every supervillain to appear on Birdman had a snazzy lair of some kind. Mountains and personal islands were the most popular, but the sky was the limit, and more than one bad guy took up residence there.
- The Death Stars from the Star Wars movies contain most of the features on the above list.
- Several examples from The Venture Bros., most prominently The Monarch's mighty Cocoon.
- The Marvel Universe has the modestly named Castle Doom. The Red Skull, Superia, and HYDRA seem to prefer elaborate bases hidden on seemingly deserted islands. The Kingpin, being a "legitimate businessman", has a penthouse in a New York skyscraper— with the floor directly below him packed full of lowlife goons. Doctor Demonicus raised an island from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Magneto had his own private asteroid base in orbit.
- In the Whateley Universe, you can order your own Supervillain Lair from a website. There are ones listed for sale or rent, there are Supervillain Lair timeshares on the island of Karedonia (which is run by a supervillain), there is everything you could want, down to 'Evil lair human resources specialists to keep your henchmen happy'.
- Castle Heterodyne, and, for that matter, the Mechanicsburg as a whole, it being the town of Igors. An enormous, ancient and sentient castle, with its cavernous halls and wavy passages filled with the Death Traps, and more than slightly whacked in what it has as a head, it certainly qualifies. Somewhat subverted in that for at least two generations, including the most recent, Heterodynes were the heroes, but their castle is much, much, much older. Castle Wulfenbach and other Sparks' lairs are on the book too. Pretty much unsurprisingly, the comic being about Mad Scientists.
- The plane of Rath, a parasitic plane connected to Dominaria, has as its centerpiece a stronghold that looks like nothing so much as an inverted mountain. From within its vast structure, the evincars of Rath have plotted for their Phyrexian masters to conquer Dominaria in the name of Yawgmoth. While the Stronghold doesn't have one or two of the above list, it notably subverts at least one of them, with giant bugs roaming the air ducts and an apparently bottomless pit despite it having defined dimensions.
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