Just a few short months after this article was published announcing my find, AutoWorld (Johnny Lightning’s parent company) has added the new Viper diecast to their website for pre-order (both Adrenaline Red and Billet Silver). They’re set to fully release in July and are currently priced at $8.99 on the store. Now if that’s all I had to share, the article would pretty much just end here (a bit pathetically) and I’d move on. However, with the release of the product page has come a very interesting update to this story…
If you read the initial article I wrote on this new casting, you’ll remember I mentioned the incorrect Gen IV wheels this model appeared with. At the time, I speculated the wheels (and model itself) were just pre-production, and the real (Gen V accurate) wheels would be shown at a later date. We’re now at a later date, and well… it’s complicated.
If you look at this packaging image of the Billet Silver Dodge Viper, you’ll see the wheels are not the H-pattern design we saw in the free-standing photos months back. In fact, they look shockingly like the Gen V accurate 5-spoke Rattlers Dodge Vipers of this era were offered with. This would seemingly support my theory that the models in the photos we were looking at were just pre-production examples.
However, if you look at the aforementioned free-standing photo (of the same Billet Silver car), the incorrect Gen IV H-Patterns are back on the diecast. Obviously this could mean Johnny Lightning simply hasn’t updated all the product images yet, but here’s where it actually gets strange.
If you take a look at the Adrenaline Red Viper, none of the images (no, not even the packaging image) show the car adorning the 5-Spoke Rattlers. If I were to make a list of what I believed the most likely reasons for this are, it would go something like this (in order of most to least likely): Johnny Lightning simply has a lot of old images they haven’t replaced yet and the Billet Silver Viper was the first on the Rattlers to be photographed, the Gen IV wheels are the actual wheels they’re going with (hopefully not), the Gen V wheels are the actual ones they’re going with, and the Billet Silver car will get the Rattlers and the Adrenaline Red car will get the H-Spokes. The last one obviously being the most “out there” theory but considering how close we are to this new model launching, I’m worried there’s even a remote possibility of it coming to pass.
In any case, it is very good news indeed that the model is actually coming to market and not being dropped while in development! Better still, we can actually pre-order it now! And on that happy note, I’ll see you all later.