>>54618509The first golbat sprite had no tongue and Sugimori drew it based on that. Some genius working on the redesigned set of front sprites that would end up in Blue decided to give golbat a funny tongue. However, most of what came after was standardised on the designs in those initial promotional illustrations by Sugimori, and by Yellow that was already influencing the core games.
It could be that nobody at GF was actually opposed to golbat's tongue but it just got ignored in favour of consistency with the anime and merchandise. Basically, blame pokémania.
