From 'War Games' to 'Interstellar': NORAD's bunker is a film favorite

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the alternate command center for the North American Aerospace Defense command (NORAD), has captured the imagination of storytellers since it was constructed in the 1960s.

No wonder. A highly classified military installation carved into the heart of a mountain is the perfect foil for crazed military generals, precocious young coders and otherworld explorers.

Here's a look at some favorites:

In the 1983 movie WarGames," a teenage Matthew Broderick almost starts World War III after connecting his home computer to a supercomputer inside Cheyenne Mountain to play a war simulation. That supercomputer controls NORAD's computer defense system and all of the intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, finds the bumbling leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex huddled together beneath the Cheyenne Mountain as they try to avert the inevitable apocalypse set in motion by a rogue Air Force brigadier general.

In the Terminator franchise, the primary antagonist is Skynet: an artificial intelligence system that puts humanity on the brink of extinction and eventually builds the Terminators. Skynet was originally built to control the U.S. missile-defense system and installed at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex before it turned on its creators and caused global thermonuclear war.

In the TV series Stargate SG-1, which aired on the Showtime and Syfy networks, Stargate Command and the Stargate itself are housed in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, kept secret and safe from the public eye.

In The Hunger Games, the resistance is headquartered in an old military facility built beneath a mountain in District 13. According to the story, the country Panem exists in North America on the remains of what was once the USA, and District 13 is capable of launching nuclear missiles — a nod, perhaps, to NORAD and the Cheyenne Mountain.

Christopher Nolan's space-time-bending odyssey Interstellar used NORAD's mountain bunker as the headquarters of the new NASA. Matthew McConaughey stumbles upon the top secret operation after discovering the coordinates to Cheyenne Mountain are being transmitted to him by a mysterious entity.