The Strange Case of Hector Ramirez

It might seem a little bit odd that the Joe Team and Cobra would have been either unaware of or not interfacing with the Autobots and Decepticons, given that they operated in the same G.I. Joe universe. It also seems odd that neither group encountered the Inhumanoids. Who wouldn’t have wanted to see a “decomposed” Zartan or what would happen if an Inhumanoid had touched a Transformer. (Would they have rusted? Would they have returned to a monstrified protoform?) And Jem and the Holograms never seemed to have come across any of the Joes, though a double bill with them and Cold Slither might have really been something to see. None of it happened, though it would be fun if it had.

However, there was one character that crossed between Jem, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Inhumanoids. It was a pesky reporter named Hector Ramirez. How did Hector, and only Hector, have the power to do this?

Did Hector have some clearance granted by one of the various presidents or politicians in the Sunbow shows? Did he have an ability to invisibly slip through the various alternate universes of Jem, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Inhumanoids? Or was he an animated human Easter egg who moved through the shows with a will of his own? By the time he shows up on Jem, he is interviewing Flint Westwood. I’m not making this up. It’s both a riff on Clint Eastwood and on myself.

Meanwhile, he bombards my character in G.I. Joe with questions, and we find out he’s a dupe of the Baroness. He showed up on Transformers as a reporter in “Prime Target,” cowritten by Buzz Dixon and myself. He also showed up in a season four script that I don’t remember having anything to do with but which is credited to me and Meg McLaughlin. I credit Buzz Dixon with the creation of Hector Ramirez.

Hector Ramirez was Sunbow’s parody of Geraldo Rivera, though I don’t remember it ever being discussed. He fit into Sunbow shows because he was the closest thing to a Sunbow character who existed in the real world, and we always needed investigative journalists in our stories.

Anybody who was alive in the eighties remembers Geraldo!, which at the time was regarded as “trash TV.” Nowadays, it would be mainstream premium fare. (Okay, I’m being cynical, but it was the precursor to reality TV, which would be more or less invented by the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike.) There was no topic too outrageous or inflammatory for Geraldo. At one point there was a brawl between white supremacists, anti-racist skinheads, black activists, and Jewish activists live on the show. Geraldo got his nose busted in front of millions of Americans.

He soon got fired by ABC for protesting the fact that they wouldn’t air a report about the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy. (Ted Kennedy was a partial inspiration for Senator Masterson on Inhumanoids.) Undaunted, he found out about a secret vault buried beneath a Chicago hotel in which Al Capone had allegedly stashed his loot. In a scene straight out of Inhumanoids, he brought a medical examiner along in case they found bodies, and an IRS agent in case they found money.

Again, I’m not making this up.

In my version, they open the vault and—sslliikkkk—a tendril rips out and grabs all three of them and drags them deep under the earth. They are then taken to Metlar’s molten Shangri-La, Infernac, where the head Inhumanoid introduces Geraldo to his new trophy girlfriend, the former Statue of Liberty—Metlar filled statues with “primal energy” and brought them to life—and made him do a friendly story about the Inhumanoids.

Of course, that didn’t happen on either the Geraldo special or in an Inhumanoids episode, but it should have. In the real world, he opened the vault and there were a couple of old bottles in there. He claimed they were moonshine and then went across the street to blast down some tequila.

On the Inhumanoids show, he was decomposed and turned into something horrific, but the truth is we had nothing but affection for Geraldo. If you want a quick before-and-after that serves almost as a metaphor for the difference between the eighties and the teens, watch some YouTube of eighties Geraldo in the vault and then watch him on Fox News. It seems like he got recomposed and reinvented and found a way to thrive long after the eighties.

Far beyond Geraldo’s career, the idea that a character wandered between worlds was novel in those days, and this kind of stuff paved the way. Later on, we’d do a sort of crossover with Marissa Faireborne. It was never explicitly stated, but we thought of her as Flint and Lady Jaye’s daughter. As far as a formal crossover, it would have been interesting to do, but I don’t remember it ever being suggested.