Classics Dirge

Allegiance: Decepticons
Series: Classics
Category: Custom Deluxe
Year: 2009

Talk all you want, loser. The only sound you make that I'll listen to is a death rattle.
Dirge always had a mean side, but with his new lease on life his desire to end the lives of others has grown. After all, now he knows for certain that there's nothing there when you go offline. He thinks about it a lot, that nothingness. Every time he blasts another living creature into atoms, it gives his turbine blades a little thrill to imagine that life just blinking out and being gone forever.

Remarks: Classics Dirge here is a repaint with several mold changes of Classics Ramjet (or rather parts of both the Classics and the Henkei! Henkei! version if I remember correctly), so see there for the full review of this figure in general. Here I just want to write some words on the changes LimeWire made to this figure. A side note first: So far the only Classics version of Dirge we've seen was the one available exclusively at the 2007 Botcon (see Xion's Classics Seekers review for pictures). The Botcon Dirge was a straight-up repaint of Ramjet, though, no mold changes. Limewire took it a bit further than that.

First, the colours. Dirge's traditional blue and beige is present and accounted for, no problems. At first glance he might just appear a tad to colourful in robot mode, but if you put him right next to G1 Dirge, you can see that his colour details are a very close match to the decals of the original. So absolutely no complaints there. The only slight flaw here is that the colouring isn't quite a hundred percent complete in the joints. When Dirge bends his knees, you can see the original white colour. But short of completely disassembling him, I don't know how one should have gotten that right.

Now to the mold changes. Like I said, the Botcon Dirge just took the wings that came with Ramjet and simply coloured them beige. LimeWire took it a step further. The original Dirge had no tail fins. Now while that should mean he'd be unable to fly sidesways, it was just the way he looked. Additionally he had a strange wingshape in that there were tiny wings set before the bigger wings on his sides. LimeWire killed two birds with one stone, sawed off the tail fins and turned them into those tiny side wings. And to complete the picture he sawed off the tips of the big wings, which point down on Ramjet, and turned them around so they turn upwards.

Now while I'm not the biggest fan of the Classics Seeker design, I do like it in general and one has to admit that LimeWire did himself proud here. In my not as humble as it should be opinion this custom-made Dirge here is superior to the Botcon version because of the more G1-faithful wings and colour details. A very nice example how small changes to an existing figure can accomplish quite a bit. Now I know that LimeWire is working on a Thrust as well. I can hardly wait.

Rating: B+