Merge:Danger Room

The Danger Room is a fictional training facility built for the X-Men of Marvel Comics as part of the various incarnations of the X-Mansion.

Early designs
In the early books it was filled with traps, projectile firing devices, 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 managing the room's mechanisms to oversee the exercise while ensuring the subject's safety. Later the Danger Room was upgraded with robots for the X-Men to fight against.

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 Dr. Hank McCoy (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 a lot of damage over the years, usually from X-Men trainings or X-Men going rogue, as Colossus did during The Muir Island Saga. Supervillains have often taken over the facility, most notably Arcade. It is suggested in the X-men Official Guide that the objects in the danger room are holograms surrounded by force fields. It is also revealed that the Danger Room can display holograms in only 32-bit colour.

Sentience
Recently in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, the Danger Room has taken up sentience, attacked the X-Men and traveled to Genosha to kill Professor Xavier. As a sentient it has been named "Danger" and taken on a female appearance. Xavier was revealed to have known the Danger Room's sentience and chose not to reveal it, much to the dismay of the X-Men who seem to view this deception as a taking on of Magneto's former ideals. This storyline is somewhat similar to a Generation X storyline where their version of the danger room attacked them.

With its female appearance destroyed by Beast, "Danger's" consciousness was presumed to still exist within the conflicted consciousness of a Sentinel that destroyed Genosha. However, "she" was shown back in her humanoid form, where "she" infiltrated S.W.O.R.D. headquarters to speak with Ord of the Breakworld.

With the Danger Room gone, the X-Men have have resorted to using the empty room to train with their students. Also, the student Prodigy has built a "Danger Cave" underneath the X-Mansion which acts similarly to the Danger Room.

The Danger Room gaining sentience and trying to kill the X-Men is reminiscent of "The Hunt For Xavier" arc which ran through The Uncanny X-Men #362-364 and X-Men (2nd series) #82-84, which featured Cerebro gaining life of its own and using the Xavier Protocols to hunt down and destroy the X-Men. It should be noted this story ran seven years previous to Whedon's 2005 "Dangerous" arc.

Alternate versions
The Ultimate X-Men also have a Danger Room with similar technology, including smaller holographic training rooms in the hidden safehouses prepared by Professor X. However, these are prone to malfuctions, such as a fight sequence producing Hasidic rabbis instead of ninjas.

Television
The Danger Room was in some X-Men specific episodes of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the 1980's Pryde of the X-Men.

The Danger Room was often on the 1990's animated X-men.

It was used often for training in the animated series X-Men: Evolution

Video Games
The Danger Room, out of control, was the basis for all but the last level of the first Sega Genesis Console's X-Men (Sega video game)}X-Men video game.

The Danger Room is Cyclops' stage in the arcade and console imported game, X-Men: Children of the Atom. The holographic backdrops change occasionally, and Professor X is in the background. The stage music is also called 'Danger Room' on the game's official soundtrack.

On Film
Although it made no appearance until the third film, a room saying "Danger" is spotted in the X-Men film.

The Danger Room makes an appearance in the film X-Men: The Last Stand where the team has a training exercise against a Sentinel among other threats. The room more closely resembles Star Trek's holodeck concept, as there is no control booth and the room produces solid holograms or in visa versa scence X-Men and the Danger Room have been around longer.