Kamen Rider Scrap

This colorful fellow is Kamen Rider Scrap.

So, yeah...I have a Kamen Rider now. And a shitty remedial flood-fill coloring of him, too, so I could work out his look. Just, I dunno, consider this a WIP for now...

A couple of weeks ago, after my son and I watched a "reverse marathon" of Edgar Wright's "Blood and Croquets Trilogy" ("The World's End" at the theater followed by "Hot Fuzz" and "Shawn of The Dead" once we got home), I had a really, really vivid dream that had nothing whatsoever to do with any of them.

In it, a Japanese 20-something had dressed up as a fake Rider for a little kid's birthday party. After the party was attacked by a biker gang, he got them to chase him on his bicycle and ended up run off the road and down a steep hill, unable to stop. However, the speed he was going at was enough to spin the turbine on what he'd assumed was a fake Henshin Driver belt buckle and turned him into an ACTUAL Kamen Rider, transforming his fake costume bits into a real suit, as seen above, and his bicycle into a motocross bike, allowing him to return to fight off the delinquents.

Weird thing number 1: in the dream, he was supposed to be ME, only me as I was back in the 90s in college (and played by a Japanese actor), and I actually OWNED the jacket and glasses that became part of his uniform above (turn the red black and you have the ones I owned). Also, in the dream, he was actually called "Kamen Rider Heckfire" which is why he has that "H" pattern on his helmet.

Other highlights of the dream: he faced down some "enemy soldiers" dressed in black hooded rain ponchos (?) and WWII gas masks who threw him off the roof of a building in his "civilian" form, only to have the terminal velocity winds blowing over the Driver turn him into Scrap long enough to survive hitting the ground; later, he discovers the power that turned his cheesy makeshift cosplay into an actual Rider form and his bike into a motorcycle can extend to, well, anything he touches...at one point, he uses it to armor up a car he's clinging onto so it can smash through a roadblock, and another moment has him walking out of a toy store decked out in Nerf guns, only to Henshin and have them turn into actual weapons.

He also kept wearing my old black trenchcoat after the initial change, too.

Weird Thing 2: I've since been reading up on the various Riders because of this guy, and apparently, just like Doctor Who, there were no Kamen Rider shows in the 90s when this guy's story was set, only a couple of movies. Not only this, his turbine belt and the "needs speed to transform" thing with it was apparently a regular gimmick of the original 70s-80s Showa Era Riders...but the idea of a Rider getting powers solely from the Henshin Drivers is a gimmick of the post-millennial Heisei Era Riders. I think I must've picked these facts up at some point, because otherwise it's weird that I would dream up a Rider that bridges the two eras by using gimmicks from both and operates in the time period where there WERE no Riders...

I've grown inordinately fond of this guy. I even figured out where he actually GOT the Henshin Driver, from a traditional "escaped cyborg" Rider who was killed in the salvage yard he assembled the bits of his own costume at, the broken Driver hurled into a random pile when its former wearer exploded in the car crusher. With all this trash and junkyard and "making stuff out of refuse" themes, it would be suitably 90s to make him eco-themed...but I'm thinking Scrap's arc is more about creativity and finding one's own unique niche versus conformity and stagnation.

I was thinking I needed a new muse, after all.