Though, I do wonder, do we know for sure that all the frames taken out was due to lack of memory, or were the coders just lazy?
I'm curious of that myself - was it to cut down on load times? maybe make it load less info? very weird.
It was both laziness and memory space. Well programmed games like Dracula X, which is loaded with animation, show how much can be packed into 2 megs of space. Since this was a TTi-only release, it was slapped together with a minimal amount of effort and the proof is the end result. They probably just looked at what the smallest stage section was in memory size, figured out how much needed to be cut to program in each section the exact same way and then took it straight out of Bonk's animation, since it's the common denominator throughout the game.