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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 volcanic isle, 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:
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Comic Books
- Lots of series set in The DCU.
- The Marvel Universe has the modestly named Castle Doom (In the city of Doomstadt, in Doctor Doom's home country of Latveria). 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.
- Nearly every James Bond film ever made.
- Spoofed to death in the Austin Powers series.
- The Death Stars from the Star Wars movies contain most of the features on the above list.
- Spoofed in D.E.B.S., with Lucy's lair being something vaguely evil-looking. Then, after the film skewers the meetup dialogue (and Lucy's "evil" image), we find out that, despite all her high-tech gadgetry, the lair still has yet to be completed. This, of course, could be due to Lucy's just having come back from Antarctica or wherever.
Live Action TV
Music
Tabletop Games
- Spoofed relentlessly in Totally Renamed Spy Game by Cheapass Games (formerly known as "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond").
- The entire basis of 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.
- Magic The Gathering: 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.
- The Dungeons And Dragons supplement Evil contains instructions for playing evil P Cs, including details on the construction of an evil lair. These cover finding a remote location, dealing with local creatures and possibly making them your minions, the cost of constructing a lair underwater or inside a volcano, creating magic traps and guardians, building escape routes... Pretty much a short handbook for this trope from a Dangerously Genre Savvy villain's point of view.
Video Games
- Castlevania. Natch. Sometimes this troper starts to wonder if the lair itself is more of an interesting character than boring ol' Dracula.
- Evil Genius, where as the resident supervillain, you get to design and control the lair.
- Impossible Mission, by Epyx.
- The original Metal Gear that spawned the Metal Gear Solid series.
- 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
- In Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3, after assassinating Allied Supreme Commander Bingham Premier Cherdenko decides that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and launches attacks at you from his Secret Volcano Base.
- Similarly, his opposite President Ackerman has a superweapon hidden in Mount Rushmore, decimating each of the Presidents' as he activates it.
- Don't forget the Temple of Nod/Temple Prime in the Tiberian series. Sure, they typically get blasted by the Ion Cannon, but that was Kane's plan all along.
- In the Kingdom Hearts series, Organization XIII has had not one, but 2 castles surrounded by perpetual lightning so far.
- it should be noted that their names are "Castle Oblivion" and "The Castle That Never Was". And if a Disney world has a villain, he'll have his lair...
- At the centre of the City Of Villains, Lord Recluse spins his web of schemes within his futuristic fortress in Grandville, the capital of his island nation. And that's just the main base- each of his lieutenants has their own customised base (Ghost Widow has an Evil Tower Of Ominousness, Dr Aeon has a futuristic city...), and dozens of smaller Arachnos bases are dotted in all the territory they control. Player villains can join a Super Group and construct a base of their own.
Web Comics
- This map
 from Casey and Andy pretty much sums it up.
- Castle Heterodyne, and, for that matter, 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 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.
- Minions At Work: directions to the lair.
Western Animation
- 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.
- 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.
- Several examples from The Venture Bros., most of them subverted. None of the other characters can tell what the Monarch's flying cocoon is supposed to be (it's mistaken for a giant pine cone more than once) and prior to season 3, it was parked in the Grand Canyon where anyone could see it. Phantom Limb had a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired base he called "the lair of the phantom", but it was located in a gated suburban community for supervillains.
- In Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Dr. Weird has his lair and laboratory somewhere on the South Jersey Shore. In the first Dr. Weird short, his Rabbot escapes by smashing through a wall; this flaw causes him problems later, as his inventions sometimes escape or are stolen from "[HIS] IMPENETRABLE FORTRESS!"
- Syndrome in The Incredibles has an absolutely fabulous lair, in a tropical paradise - Nomanisan Island - under a volcano. Complete with monorail, underground rocket launch site, underwater docks for the subplanes, and lava walls.
Web Original
- 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'.
- The Dark Overlords from the serial Dimension Heroes each live in a different type of scary lair, from a fortress to a castle to a palace to a citadel.
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