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The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest villain in Black Widow borrowed his high-flying idea from Doctor Doom’s Silver Age playbook.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Black Widow, now playing in theatres and available for streaming through Disney+ Premier Access.
The latest feature-length entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe has thrust its titular super-spy, Black Widow, into the spotlight. However, one of the most noteworthy aspects of the film, the villain’s flying fortress housing the Red Room, was predicted by another Marvel villain, Doctor Doom, long before the MCU.
The Red Room has been a part of the mythos of the Marvel Universe since 1998’s Shadows and Light #1. This clandestine facility where killers are forged was into killers is where Natasha was trained was first glimpsed in the MCU during 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. Apart from classical ballet lessons and brutal sparring sessions, the Red Room also subjected its recruits to subliminal programming and brainwashing. This is one of the key driving forces behind Black Widow’s mission to bring an end to the Red Room and its leader, General Dreykov. And in the MCU, Dreykov found the perfect hiding place for it among the clouds. This leads to a high-flying battle to quite literally bring down everything Dreykov has built — though he is far from the first Marvel villain to feel that particular brand of defeat.
Long before the floating Red Room, Doctor Doom’s Flying Fortress set a precedent for secret floating headquarters in the Marvel Universe. First introduced in 1963’s Fantastic Four #17 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the massive structure served as a mobile base of operations for the Latverian tyrant, as well as the perfect place from which to watch his machinations unfold.
Most famously, Doom surveyed the battle that unfolded after he unleashed Terrax (then Tyros) on the Fantastic Four. While Doom’s Flying Fortress has never properly served as a threat of its own, its wide array of defensive and cloaking capabilities have made it one of the most valuable vehicles in Doom’s arsenal. As a whole, the Flying Fortress might have been everything that Dreykov was aspiring to create when he moved the Red Room into the sky.
While the two ultimately served very different purposes, it is hard to imagine that the Red Room would have suffered at all from with sort of fail-safes that Doctor Doom has enlisted in crafting his Flying Fortress. Even considering the fact that Doom’s plans have always got awry at some point, that it is most often due to his own hubris lends those plans an extra bit of credence.
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