Favorite Fortress!

[Gurz]

Krystal Fortress from Superman The Movie.

[DrNewGod]

I was always fond of the original from the first time I saw it in All-Star Squadron...

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...that said, my favorite was the Post-Crisis version. I liked the idea that it moved with the ice pack, so you needed X-Ray/Telescopic vision to find it, and heat vision to enter it.

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Of course, that's no longer viable with the icecap disappearing...

[llozymandias]

My two favorites are the silver-age & the tesseract. The silver-age version had at least two flaws. One the space is too limited. I imagine that at the rate Kal collects things, he would run out of room very fast. The second is that most of the time it was depicted as hollowed out mountain. Aside from the door, the rest of the exterior was the mountain itself. It was assumed that all that rock would keep out all enemies. Though sometimes (like in the fortress of solitude special) it was shown to have a metal exterior. That still had the drawback of limited space. The main drawback of the tesseract was that the exterior was too small. If enemies found it, they didn't need to break into it. They could have simply taken it. My ideal fortress would be a combo of these two versions. On the outside it's the silver-age version. With the giant key. On the inside it's the tesseract.

[Jim Kelly]

I never knew that the pre-Crisis had any definite dimensions. It's probably just my imagination, but I assumed it to be terribly big. It's up there in the Canadian Arctic somewhere, which is one big place. And I imagine a lot of it is underground. Also, like with the Doctor and Snoopy, it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

[Last Son]

I know people quibble about the Donner fortress because Superman didn't build it himself, but it served a different and new purpose that didn't quite exist in the comics at the time, which was to reveal to Clark his heritage while also being a monument to Krypton that stores the history and knowledge of Krypton.

[Shadowcat]

I really liked the post Crisis one.

[llozymandias]

I know people quibble about the Donner fortress because Superman didn't build it himself, but it served a different and new purpose that didn't quite exist in the comics at the time, which was to reveal to Clark his heritage while also being a monument to Krypton that stores the history and knowledge of Krypton.

Not true. Silver-bronze-age Superman knew more about his kryptonian heritage than most of us know about earth. And this is even before he rescued Kandor from Brainiac. The Fortress was largely a monument to Krypton.

[Last Son]

Not true. Silver-bronze-age Superman knew more about his kryptonian heritage than most of us know about earth. And this is even before he rescued Kandor from Brainiac. The Fortress was largely a monument to Krypton.

I think you're misunderstanding me. Sure, the pre-crisis fortress contained Kryptonian artifacts and parts of it served as a tribute to Krypton, but the movie fortress was specifically Kryptonian, constructed by a Kryptonian device and based on Kryptonian architecture, its purpose was to inform Clark of his Kryptonian heritage and to help guide him. Golden age Superman learned of his heritage by time traveling back to Krypton before it blew up. Silver age Superman just knew he was Kryptonian all along because of his super-memory and the fact that he was a toddler before he was sent to Earth. STM started the trend of Clark learning of his heritage from a Kryptonian device sent along with him to Earth, usually once he reaches his late teens.

[Jim Kelly]

I never quibbled about the Donner fortress being Kryptonian in nature or the purpose for which it existed--there was something else about it that made me uneasy. While it's visually intriguing it's also hard to get a handle on. I can understand where everything is in the classic fortress, but in this one there no sense of where anything is within that space, so it's hard as a viewer to get a sense of it. Which is odd for film, because usually directors try to orient the viewer to the scene--keeping to the 180 degree rule, establishing points of reference and such. Because the space is so big and white and there aren't many objects inside it (other than the characters), you have no frame of reference and can't hold it in your head where everyone is standing (or flying) from shot to shot.

[protege]

Because of my interested in ancient American culture, I was partial to the rain-fortress, in the jungle. I wish they stuck with it.

[manofsteel1979]

The silver age original, followed by the tesseract version, followed by the New 52 variant of the Donner fortress. The current Bendis one is pretty cool too.