Well, the Cookery Ponies and the gingerbread pegasus indicates that it's not impossible for stuff like this to happen and be related to prototypes. I am just a bit suspicious where Hasbro is concerned.
If you look at the cards next to each other then what it looks like to me is that the later one has minor amendments to the original one. I actually looked closer than before and if you really look at it, you can see very slight adjustments to the Surprise and Gusty graphics to make them a little more correct in terms of the poses (which I never noticed till now). The walking pose Hippety Hop unicorn is a total anomaly, but Fifi looks a tiny bit like she's going to rear. So when you look at it that way, I can see why people would think that there must have been a pegasus Skippety at the very least. Why change the other poses and not that one?
I'm kind of cynical though when assuming packaging errors means there's a prototype that looks like that. It might simply have been an error by the editing team, or more difficult to edit them into more accurate species or poses. There's obviously a huge effort been gone to here to retain the bulk of the original card, so that means they can't make major changes. I would still think that's the reason they look wrong, because there's nothing logical to suggest a walking pose Hippety Hop unicorn existed as a prototype. And if that is wrong, but is on the card, there's no reason to look at other errors any differently either. I don't know how they were produced, but when you start comparing similar pose ponies across cards from surrounding years, some of them do look quite similar, which makes you wonder if they're working from template graphics rather than actual ponies to draw these images. The US backcards always make me feel like someone stuck a bunch of ponies randomly on a backdrop anyway, because of their adherence to pose making them look often a bit awkward, especially in the sky. If they were done pony by pony from a stylesheet of some kind, that would explain it. And it might also explain wires being crossed in the design element.
But I might also be being influenced by Europe, because recolouring the same card for different country usage is pretty common, especially around the same time period with the Hopscotch set. Also, pose accuracy is more true of the US line than the European ones for a lot of the time, so there's more possibility that a pony drawn in a certain way might be meant to represent something that was intended, even if it didn't happen.
I'm just inclined to be a cynic.
Welcome to the MLP Arena! 
Guests: 780
Hidden: 0
Users: 10
