Slo W. Pokeso i did actually start watching kamen rider and it is genuinely interesting to see so many of the tropes that are foundational to modern japanese entertainment media being invented in real time
i gotta say, though, what did genuinely surprise me is that arguably the most iconic thing associated today with kamen rider (and the whole super sentai genre in general) didn't even show up in the first season (if you want to call it that) - it took 14 episodes until the first proper HENSHIN! sequence happened, and it wasn't even the OG rider that did it first
like, it's one of those things were you'd just assume it's always been there from the very beginning, though to be fair, the first 13 episodes of a franchise that spans over half a century at this point makes this basically a rounding error lmao