Sonic Pixel Pals Sprite

[Zephadus]

So I bought one of these cute little guys recently:

As you can see, it's sonic, but in the form of a lamp!
I showed my little brother, who I thought would be excited (I've been getting him into retro gaming).
Long story short, he questioned whether or not it was officially-branded, and didn't recognize the sprite.
Curious, I started comparing some of Sonic's idle poses from various games, but sadly,  I couldn't find any that matched...
So, I figured I'd ask around here!

Here, we have my re-creation of the Pixel Pals object, and Sonic's idle pose from Sonic 1.
Hopefully someone can confirm whether this is a sprite from something I overlooked, or an original for the sole purpose of the product.

[Diogenes]

Doesn't match any official sprites that I can think of. It looks like a scaled-down and cleaned up version of that Sonic 1 sprite to me.

[Blue Blood]

Yeah, I have the same piece. It's just a scaled down S1 sprite to match the dimensions of other Pixel Pals.

[Zephadus]

That's pretty interesting!
He seems to be the only one to have gone through this, though.
I also have Mega Man, and he's pixel-perfect, but then most of the other characters they have who are non-pixely use Mega Man as a base, so that makes sense.
Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Ninja Turtles, DC Superheroes...
The only other characters who look kind of different in their current roster are Ren & Stimpy, who look to be original works.
I thought they might be from "Stimpy's Invention" on the Genesis, but nothing matches the poses at all.
It seems odd to me that they mostly "8-bitify" modern characters, rather than make more characters who fall within the 16-32 pixel width/height size, though.