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Trivia / Kamen Rider

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Trivia tropes applying to the Kamen Rider franchise:

  • Ascended Fanon: As with most Tokusatsu fandoms, Kamen Rider fans divided the franchise up into distinct periods based off of eras of the Japanese calendar. However, rather strictly following the official calendar (the Heisei era began in 1989, midway through Black RX's run) it's tied to creator Shotaro Ishinomori: works made while he was alive are considered Showa and those made between his death and the beginning of the Reiwa era are Heisei. Toei took this to heart, officially classifying the movies made in the 90s as Showa when it was time for the two eras to throw down in Heisei Rider vs. Showa Rider: Kamen Rider Taisen feat. Super Sentai. Kamen Rider Zi-O took it a step further, with The Movie featuring villains based off of "lost Heisei" productionsnote  Black RX, the 90s movies, and Amazons while the stage show had the Riders from The First and The Next (modern reboots of the original series and V3) and Amazons identify themselves as "Showa Riders who belong to the Heisei era".
  • Bad Export for You: Due to Monstanote  acquiring the distribution rights for the last few Heisei riders and the Reiwa riders in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, The Toei Tokukatsu World Youtube Channel actively blocks those uploads from these five countries. Instead, these five countries are expected to watch these riders off Monsta's Youtube channel, which is censored to the Malaysian government's taste.
  • Channel Hop: The franchise started on NET (now TV Asahi), running up to the end of Kamen Rider Amazon. One week later, Kamen Rider Stronger (1975), the last series of the original televised run began broadcasting on MBS/TBS while the old NET slot was filled by Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, the first Super Sentai. Kamen Rider's association with TBS continued with the second runnote , the ''ZX'' TV special (1984), and the third runnote . Lastly, TBS hosted a special to promote the film ZO (1993). Ultimately, Kamen Rider Kuuga (2000) started the fourth and current run, returning to TV Asahi and airing side by side with Super Sentai to this day.
  • Content Leak: For a large chunk of the franchise's modern history, it was routine for catalogs meant for retailers' eyes only, advertising all of the show's Rider content for the entire fiscal quarter, to be leaked online as they became available. The eager fandom was very comfortable with this practice, until, during Kamen Rider Zi-O, a lead franchise producer was tweeted at about the content of one of these catalogs. His reply? "You are supposed not to know about Trinity." The catalogs haven't been leaked since Kamen Rider Zero-One's second quarter. Descriptions of the catalogs still leak often but are difficult to distinguish from fake rumors.
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
    • The subtitle translation work for the Southeast Asian release of recent Kamen Rider films have shown that the translators don't do research on the series' context in general; while most Transformation Trinket announcements went untranslated, those that do get translated became serious mishearings that were published as they were heard. Notable examples include:
  • Hey, It's That Place!: Some locations are not only repeated in the same season, but occasionally will repeat in multiple seasons.
    • This might as well as be called "Hey! It's that Gravel Pit!", as it applies to Tokusatsu, Because both Kamen Rider AND its sibling Super Sentai have, for the past few years, made use of the same gravel pit for every big mass battle they have, to the point where Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger, a parody of Super Sentai intended for the adult periphery who grew up watching Sentai as kids, made use of it in their first episode.
    • There is also a particular rooftop that has seen use in basically every Heisei-era Rider series.
    • Not to mention that outdoor theater/stadium.
    • The sets of Kamen Rider Ryuki and Kamen Rider Gaim are the same. Funnily enough, battles between Riders are a theme of both.
    • One particular warehouse got used so often in Zi-O that it must have been a running gag - and then Zero One kept on using it as well. It had been used previously in other seasons, but no to the extent these two have.
    • Ex-Aid had the justification of an exceptionally rare non-video game case of Gameplay and Story Integration: the Riders could select what "stage" they wanted to fight in, being the same seaside dock, gravel pit, and park locations that have been used extensively in the franchise for years.
  • Late Export for You: With Shout Factory finally getting the license to distribute the series in the US, the original and Kuuga got released decades after their initial airing in Japan - 50 for the original, 20 for Kuuga. Discotek Media has also thrown their hat into the ring, with a US release of BLACK slated for 2023 — just over 35 years since that series first aired.
  • Milestone Celebration:
  • No Export for You:
    • For the most part, played straight. Not counting either adaptation, exceptions include Kamen Rider V3 (has DVDs due to airing in Hawaii), Kamen Rider: The First (was licensed by Media Blasters; now a case of Keep Circulating the Tapes), Kamen Rider Fourze, Kamen Rider Wizard, Kamen Rider Ghost (all three aired on the premium channel TV Japan with no subs), and Kamen Rider Amazons (released on Amazon Prime).
    • The series had been brought out to the Asian market, with mainly a Cantonese dub for the Heisei Riders currently airing in Hong Kong complete with some of its movies. There was also English dubs produced for English-speaking Asian countries produced by Voiceovers Unlimited in Singapore, before the company was shut off and the production was passed on to a Hong Kong-based company. It started from Ryuki and had mostly continued (Hibiki and Kiva were skipped over) up till Wizard, however it was played straight for all series beyond Wizard ever since.
      • Malaysia had a unique case where a Malay dub for Build was aired right after Wizard, skipping all other seasons in-between.
      • A media company named Purple Plan managed to bring the Heisei Generations FOREVER movie out to some Southeast Asian cinemas in 2019 in English subs. Due to the positive response garnered, they have also since exported all subsequent Kamen Rider films.
      • Played straight that the Philippines didn't get any AT ALL outside of Clips. Pinoy Kamen Rider fans are not pleased. Fortunately, there's YouTube.
    • As of 2020, this was averted both by Shout! Factory running subtitled episodes of the original series in the United States and Canada with the Pluto TV channel TokuSHOUTsu, and by Toei themselves starting up a Youtube channel where they upload episodes of their Tokusatsu and anime classics from the 70s through the 90s. Kuuga, notoriously difficult to watch due to Toei's very specific legal action against streamers and torrenters being laser guided at this one series while leaving all others alone, even made it onto the Shout Factory site.
  • Outlived Its Creator: Even after Shotaro Ishinomori's 1998 death, more Kamen Rider series with original stories have been produced.
  • Out of Holiday Episode: A uniqueness of their mutual seasons means that while Kamen Rider and Super Sentai normally do feature a Christmas Episode, the tone of each episode is completely different. Kamen Rider season premiere in mid-October and Super Sentai premier in Mid-February. Given the serial nature of each show, Kamen Rider's Christmas episodes tend to fall right around the time of a much needed breather episode and typically feature some light-hearted plot (in fact, the dark twist at the end of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid's plot was exceptionally notable and had a more than a few complaints). Conversely, while Super Sentai tries to get a breather in if it can be worked, the Christmas Episode falls right around the final 10 episodes of the season, with the results typically being darker as they are now in the build-up phase to the finale.
  • Promoted Fanboy: Given the series' status as a Long Runner, more and more actors playing Heisei Riders grew up watching Showa and early Heisei Riders.
    • The greatest among these has to be Ryouta Murai, who grew up watching Kuuga, and got to be Kuuga for Kamen Rider Decade.
    • Similarly, Gaku Sano, actor for protagonist Kouta Kazuraba, grew up watching Kuuga and wanted to become a Kamen Rider when he grew up. Having snagged the role of Gaim, he stated that he wants to invoke this, inspiring a new generation of fans for the series.
  • Prop Recycling: Being a long runner, it's to be expected.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot:
    • There's a fair number of actors who, for whatever reason, are unable to/unwilling to reprise their roles, and as such, are portrayed by a Fake Shemp in any future appearances, usually not appearing outside of their Rider suits.
      • Takehisa Yamaguchi (Riderman), Shigeru Araki (Stronger), Kyoko Okada (Tackle), Gorō Naya (The Great Leader), Masayuki Izumi (Yuji Kiba), and Akiji Kobayashi (Tobei Tachibana) have passed away.
      • Shunsuke Takasugi (Super-1) and Shigeki Hosokawa (Hibiki) are both fired and blacklisted from their agencies - the former due to scamming his fans out of 50 million yen and disappearing in early 2017, and the latter due to sexual abuse accusationsnote .
      • Joe Odagiri (Kuuga) is an interesting example — though he didn't hate his time as Kuuganote  and was up for reprising the role in the summer movie that never got made, Odagiri famously isn't a fan of Tokusatsu as a genre and only took the role as a favor to producer Shigenori Takatera. However, Takatera was fired following the Troubled Production of Hibiki, meaning Odagiri had no interest in reprising the role.
    • Kamen Rider has served as a launchpad to stardom for several of its actors, which has the downside of rendering them too busy (or too expensive) to return to the franchise even if they want to do so. Some prime examples of this include Takeru Satoh (Den-O), Masaki Suda (W's Philip), Sota Fukushi (Fourze) and his co-star, Ryo Yoshizawa (Meteor), Mahiro Takasugi (Gaim's Mitsuzane) and Ryoma Takeuchi (Drive). That said, Toei does pull off miracles sometimes: Satoh returned for Zi-O's Heisei Generations Forever and Fukushi returned for Build's Heisei Generations Final (and would have been in Zi-O itself, had he not been tied up filming Bleach; he still managed to record voice-overs).
    • A partial case with Kou Domon (ZO) - while he hasn't said he would be opposed to returning, nor has he had any legal troubles, his actor has seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet, having last been reportedly seen in Indonesia. The face that he had supposedly retired from acting in 2003 according to his Wikipedia page doesn't help in the slightest, suggesting that he has definitely gone quiet after retirement.
    • The Riders' signature motorcycles have been hit by this trope a few times over the franchise's run, mostly due to safety concerns. This includes Toei requiring all Rider actors to be licensed drivers (after Skyrider star Hiroaki Murakami accidentally drove the Sky Turbo into a wall), the phasing out of Showa's iconic Scarves of Asskicking, and the diminished role of motorcycles in general in the Heisei era (this last example coupling with filming restrictions).
    • Later Heisei-era and Reiwa-era series don't feature as much motorcycle use as earlier series. In large part this is due to increasingly strict Japanese traffic laws no longer allowing non-street-legal stunt motorcycles to be filmed on public streets. Any motorcycle sequences must be filmed on private roads. Hence, recent Kamen Riders are more often Kamen Walkers.
  • Refitted for Sequel: Kamen Rider Kuuga was planned to get a movie where the protagonist battled a group of Grongi who originated in America, whose leader had a wolf motif. The movie languished in Development Hell for years before finally being cancelled, and later on Kamen Rider Decade would use a Wolf Grongi as the monsters' leader when he visited an Alternate Universe version of Kuuga.
  • Science Imitates Art: 12796 Kamenrider is an asteroid named for the series and its titular character(s).
  • What Could Have Been: Has its own page.
  • You Look Familiar: Has its own page.

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