I was stepping through the movie some more, and I'm starting to think that to save time, the animators simply drew the whole dust cloud freehand and scanned it into game-size pixels, then zoomed it to a slightly different size and scanned it into pixels again, as the inner creases do expand and contract with the outer edges. If anyone's trying to copy these graphics for a movie-accurate game, remember that it turns into three smaller clouds at the very top, where the cloud on the right looks a lot like the cloud on the left, but again doesn't look perfectly identical. For the dust clouds Ralph makes only in the movie, it's a little neater: The cloud on the right is an exact mirror of the cloud on the left, while the cloud in the middle is whatever the previous graphic for the cloud on the left was (that is, it's one frame behind in the cycle of animation), though these different-sized cloud animation frames are
not simple re-sizes of one another.
I forgot to mention earlier, one last reason to believe the ducks weren't originally planned for Fix-It Felix, Jr. is this mock ad flyer for arcades:
Why wouldn't they want to mention a recurring enemy for one more feature of the game? Even the
Red Snifit got to tease us in the manual, and you don't even have to see that one to finish the game. Forget Wreck-It Ralph; Duck-It Duck is the character who needs to seek out some "wreck-ognition" in a movie of his own!
Well, it was for the cabinet with the green-shirted Felix...
This one's screwier, as it's got the new coloring on top, but the old style everywhere else, and it's even got an old graphics style on the screen! (Looks like somewhere in the process of swapping Felix's shirt color with Mary's dress color, they also bleached everyone's skin... and added another button in place of the Nintendo logo. Does the fan-made cabinet art use the new skin tone or the old one?)
I also find it amusing that Ralph is said to be twice as large as the machine that contains him.