I just remembered, back in the day when I used to do a bit of work as a DJ (this would be mid to late '90s) there was a piece of hardware available that did some kind of realtime time stretching/pitch preservation for you. Basically it meant that DJs could drastically ramp up the tempo of a track without getting the "helium" effect on the vocals, and it also compensated for any sudden pitch change if you touched the record during a mix.

Digging around Google came up with this, but not much else.

So what I'm saying is that the technology for pitch preservation did exist back when these VHS versions were released, so it shouldn't be so much of a surprise that it was used. Just makes you wonder how many other PAL titles have the correct pitch?