Danger Room

An obstacle course in which the X-Men train appears in The X-Men #1 (September 1963), but the Danger Room is never mentioned by name. The name "Danger Room" is first used in The X-Men #2 (November 1963). According to X-Men writer/editor/co-creator Stan Lee, "the Danger Room was Jack Kirby's idea. I thought it was great because we could always open with an action sequence if we needed to."^[2]

In the early books, the Danger Room was filled with traps, projectile firing devices, flamethrowers, and mechanical dangers such as presses, collapsing walls and the like intended to challenge the trainee. Meanwhile, an observer is in the overhanging control booth^[3] managing the room's mechanisms to oversee the exercise while manually ensuring the subject's safety. Later the Danger Room was upgraded with machines and robots for the X-Men to fight against.^[4]

After befriending the Shi'ar, the X-Men rebuilt the Danger Room with Shi'ar hard-light holographic technology. These upgrades were largely added by Beast. The Danger Room is located in the X-Mansion; every destruction of the latter led to a rebuilding, and usually upgrading, of the Danger Room. The training facility has endured extensive damage over the years, usually from X-Men training or X-Men going rogue, as Colossus did during the Muir Island Saga. Supervillains have dealt critical damage to it as well as taking over the facility, especially Arcade. The security and safety protocols that ensure the safety of anyone using the Danger Room have frequently been disrupted, tampered with by villains, failed, or have been completely negated over time.

It is suggested in the X-Men Official Guide that the objects in the Danger Room are holograms surrounded by force fields, supposedly confirmed in Astonishing X-Men when a student managed to kill himself by jumping from a holographic cliff face. It is also revealed that the Danger Room can display holograms in only 32-bit color.

With the Danger Room gone, the X-Men resorted to using the empty room to train with their students. The student Prodigy, using the borrowed knowledge from several X-Men, built a "Danger Cave" underneath the X-Mansion. The Danger Cave is similar to the Danger Room, but it uses holograms to train the students by re-enacting renowned battles the X-Men were involved in, like Inferno or Onslaught, even going so far as to dress the participants up in what the X-Men wore at that time.^{[citation needed]}

The Danger Room is well known and viewed as an iconic part of the X-Men mythos.^{[5][better source needed]}