Yes, fancy belt buckles exist outside the Kamen Rider franchise — even belt buckles with skulls, I’d wager. That said, the Gel Shocker insignia does look a bit like a skull, especially if you tried to squish it down to something readable in an 8-bit sprite. And while Ganon is neither bat nor crab, you have to admit to a certain resemblance to Ganikomoru. As the original thread explains, there’s “a vague similarity — the green [on Ganikomoru] being translated as light blue [on Ganon], the red cape being transformed into a tunic, the bat ear to a pig ear, and of course Ganikomoru truncated and shorted a bit into Ganon.” And, honestly, if you tried to draw Ganikomoru in an 8-bit pixel style, you’d probably end up with something that looks a lot like this version of Ganon.

In my previous post on Ganon, I note that the only information we have on the record about the character’s origins is a 2009 Iwata Asks in which it’s noted that his original name was Hakkai, which is the Japanese name of Zhu Bajie, the pig character from the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West. This “rhymes,” more or less, because a different Journey to the West character — the Bull Demon King, specifically from the 1960 animated adaptation — was the inspiration for Bowser. But just as the Bull Demon King does not explain all of Bowser’s look, I don’t think Hakkai is the only inspiration for Ganon, and Birdie is possibly correct in pointing out the similarities between Ganikomoru and Ganon. In particular, I think this connection might explain Ganon’s name, which as far as I know is still a mystery.

This is at least the most interesting theory I’ve heard so far, and I’d be interesting to know what you all think of it.

Miscellaneous Notes

Do you think someone eventually explained to the Kamen Rider team that shocker has an alternate meaning in English-speaking culture? I hope so. 

One of the other points that Birdie makes in the thread is that as a result of the popularity of Kamen Rider, the first syllable in Geldam gets used as a shorthand for evil in unrelated franchises. For example, the Japanese name for the Transformer villain Sky Bite is Gel Shark (ゲルシャク or Gerushaku, with a hard “g” and not the soft one you’d expect in English). I do admit this seems plausible and I can’t imagine what else that syllable might be doing in the Japanese name. Do you have an explanation? Can you think of other examples?

Another connection Birdie makes in the thread is that the adult version of Link seen in Ocarina of Time bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio. It may not be a coincidence that this game debuted about a year after the box office success of Titanic — and that the grown-up version of Princess Zelda in this game looks a little bit like Kate Winslet.