....To an extent. There are slight deco differences, so it's not the straight rerelease that everyone supposed it would be:

https://www.seibertron.com/transformers/news/differences-between-earthrise-and-legacy-evolution-dirge/47805/

Specifically, the shade of purple used on his knee armor is notably darker (though this could simply be a batch variation), and the wings are cast from tan plastic, rather than being painted a tan color, which results in a difference in the sheen of glossy paint vs. molded plastic.

Honestly, I might have double-dipped if they had fixed some of the color mapping errors—his cockpit should have been a grey color, like the cartoon and G1 toy (not orange, which was only the case in early Hasbro 1985 catalogs). But, even the Takara Masterpiece toy got his cockpit wrong, so I honestly wonder if they were just cribbing off the Masterpiece toy. The Amazon toy also used a black color even though it translated closer to dark grey in animation. I would have gobbled up the toy in a heartbeat if they'd made the deco more cartoon-like. I would assume the people complaining that they could never find the Amazon Dirge/Ramjet 2-pack weren't insisting on a 100% identical release. They just wanted a chance to own the characters!

It will be interesting if Earthrise Thrust and Ramjet also eventually get a package redeco, and whether or not they end up making any minor changes to the toys.

Zob (I will buy Ramjet a second time if they fix his gauntlet colors, and I'll get another Thrust if they give him his "Auto Berserk" color scheme with the red torso)

So I pre-ordered this months ago not realizing this was a re-release.
The new wings sound like an improvement over the painted ones, but are
there any disadvantages to the new one? Do I need to do part-swapping?

On Monday, July 31, 2023 at 2:36:43 PM UTC-6, Travoltron wrote:

> So I pre-ordered this months ago not realizing this was a re-release.
> The new wings sound like an improvement over the painted ones, but are
> there any disadvantages to the new one? Do I need to do part-swapping?

I don't think there's a significant difference between the two. I had looked at photos and assumed they were the same. It wasn't until I saw the in-hand comparisons that I could see the very slight difference in the wings. It's like those very minor variations we used to get in the Star Wars toy line all the time.

Zob (already has an extra G1 Dirge reissue, definitely doesn't need an extra Earthrise version)