Posted on July 11, 2025
the mystery of the calbee cards
while doing research for a future project, I noticed something strange… was it a figment of my imagination? or had a phantom kamen rider appeared?! read on to find out!
recently I’ve been reading Ghost Hunt (specifically in this case its sequel, Akumu no Sumu Ie), where I noticed something strange – a faint outline of a familiar figure:
was that… my dear old friend, kamen rider? doing some kind of rider jump, or perhaps… a rider kick?! this certainly warranted an investigation…
from what I can tell, these are meant to allude to the calbee Kamen Rider Snack trading cards, ostensibly to show that the murders they’re dealing with occurred well in the past (though the timeline doesn’t quite match up, but I’ll let it slide!)
but you might be wondering – are they actual cards? and if they are… did I figure out which ones?!
well, I’ve done my best – I’m not as familiar with these cards as I’d like to be, so forgive me if my guesses are off! it seems like the artist was taking liberties with the composition of all of these, which is in a sense a good thing – because direct tracing can have significant consequences for artists in Japan (Kaoru Fujiwara comes to mind)… but in another sense led to some of them looking kinda silly
front and center appears to be V3 card #27 – Sayonara Futari Rider (さようなら ふたりライダー)
this looks to me like V3 card #23 – Riders’ Kamikaze Attack Strategy (ライダーの特攻作戦) – while this one is much fainter, it would make sense if the middle image is #27, as that is their farewell upon employing the strategy to defeat Turtle Bazooka
my evidence to support the above being V3 card #28 – Kame Bazooka no karada ni wa! (カメバズーカのからだには！), other than the sequence seeming logical, would be the general stance of the hips/legs/torso, and the way that the skyline and the horizontal line in the back are similar.
could this be V3 card #25 – Saigo no Coach (さいごのコーチ), featuring the infamous Scissors Jaguar – killer of V3’s father, mother and younger sister?! you decide!
this next set I am less sure of – for one thing they don’t fit the same V3 sequence (being cards for season 1), but after much discussion these appear (for now) to be our best options
credit to Mark for noticing the repeating details on the legs, making this possibly Kamen Rider card #146 – Shi wo yobu koori majin Todokira (死を呼ぶ氷魔神トドキラー )
perhaps wishful thinking on my part (and the most likely to be wrong, given that he’s the dang Kamen Rider), I want this to be #504 – Emergency Break Parachute (急ブレーキ用パラシュート) so bad, just because the notion of the artist switching out that dinky lil parachute for dramatic clouds of dust is very funny to me
it seemed like the version of the manga I found these in were scans of the original magazine release, hence the lower picture quality – but interestingly, when I sought out the final book release to get images with more detail, I found that the calbee cards appear to have been retroactively obscured/censored. this isn’t that unusual – artists touch up their work before final compiled publication all the time – but I kinda love that there was a kamen rider easter egg out there, for folks who only read the magazine :^)
