Hector Ramirez

What secrets lie within Al Capone's vault? Certainly not a couch.

Hector Ramirez is a journalist... in a looser sense of the word. Vapid and easily bamboozled, he nevertheless marches on in his attempts at investigative reporting, full of a misguided bravado that frequently puts him into unnecessarily dangerous situations. Still, thanks to a combination of weaseling and dumb luck, he has managed both to stay on the air and not get himself killed—discounting the time he was turned into a fifteen-foot-tall living zombie, at any rate. He got better.

Fiction

The Transformers cartoon

Voice actor: Frank Welker, John Stephenson (English), ? (Japanese), Albert Augier, Henry Djanik (European French), Fabian von Klitzing (German)

After the evil Lord Chumley stole a top secret Soviet jet, the blame was placed on the United States. Hector Ramirez appeared on TV, commenting on the new hostilities between the US and the Soviet Union erupting from this incident. Prime Target

Animated cartoon

In the 22nd century, Hector's great-nephew, Lester Black, carried on his work. The AllSpark Almanac

2005 IDW continuity

Jim Cantore, he is not.

Hector Ramirez was a Mexican journalist and boss of intern Sofía Orozco. With Orozco, he arranged for a tell-all interview with Jazz—where he planned to dig deep and also confront the robot about things like the death of John Powell, and also shop him to G.I. Joe. After lulling Jazz into a false sense of security with easier questions, Ramirez got more aggressive and started to twist answers as they got to the 2008 invasion. A hurt Jazz was alerted before the Joes could arrive and fled the trap. What It's Really Like

During Baron Ironblood's attack on Iacon during Earth's induction into the Council of Worlds, Ramirez reported on the scene from Earth, and was of the opinion that stranding the human delegates on Cybertron was a necessary sacrifice to prevent another Transformer invasion. Primeless, Part 1

Notes

Hector in G.I. Joe, Transformers, Inhumanoids and Jem. So far, no known My Little Pony appearances.

• Hector Ramirez was writer Buzz Dixon's parody of the infamous "journalist" Geraldo Rivera. Ramirez was originally conceived as a recurring character in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, but would go on to appear in other Hasbro- and Sunbow-created shows, including Jem and the Holograms and, most prominently, Inhumanoids (voiced by Neil Ross in all of those appearances).
• Although the character is not named on screen, Buzz Dixon claimed in an interview to have included Ramirez in a Transformers script, and "Prime Target" is the only episode that fits the bill (given that Dixon's only other script was "Carnage in C-Minor"). The fact booklet released with Pioneer's Transformers 2010 DVD box set (written by Hirofumi Ichikawa) identifies the newscaster as Ramirez (and explains the character's significance to oblivious Japanese viewers).
• Although the basics of Ramirez's physical appearance remain consistent, the details vary considerably between the shows he has appeared in, and sometimes even within them.
  • G.I. Joe first depicted Ramirez with a thin moustache and black hair parted to the side in "Twenty Questions", then depicted him with a bushy moustache and grey hair parted to the side in "The Traitor, Part II", then went back to his original design for his subsequent appearances in "Not a Ghost of a Chance", "Sins of Our Fathers" and storyboards for G.I. Joe: The Movie. The DiC seasons of G.I. Joe gave him a new outfit (brown cargo vest and green turtleneck sweater) while maintaining his facial appearance, albeit with brown hair parted to the side and a moustache that was thin in "Injustice and the Cobra Way" and then bushy in "Cobra World".
  • Jem depicted Ramirez with a thin moustache and black slicked-back hair in "One Jem Too Many". Though this may have been Hector's attempt at reinventing himself, as with his TV show Twenty Questions cancelled at the end of Inhumanoids, he was now doing red carpet reporting for Jem's resident tabloid Cool Trash Magazine.
  • In Inhumanoids Ramirez sported a bushy moustache and black hair parted to the side.
  • Ramirez's appearance in Transformers is mostly consistent with his Inhumanoids appearance, having a bushy moustache and hair parted to the side, albeit his hair is brown rather than black.
• For Ramirez's appearances in the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero seasons produced by DiC (where he was voiced by Alvin Sanders), his name was changed to "José Riviera" for reasons unknown. It appeared to be a late change, though, as newspaper text in "Injustice..." still credits his byline to "Hector Ramirez".
• Outside of the cartoons, Ramirez appeared in one issue of Devil's Due Press's G.I. Joe comic, issue #40, where he was blown up in a taxi cab by Cobra after delivering sensitive information to Joe Colton.
• When Lester Black first appeared in the Animated cartoon, some fans speculated that he might be an Animated version of Hector Ramirez. Model sheets revealed Lester's real name, dispelling the notion, but The AllSpark Almanac stepped up to the plate and forged a connection anyway!

External links

• Buzz Dixon on Hector Ramirez