While I have folks attention, I want to try training a model to generate monster/creature walk animations. Anyone know of a dataset of walk cycle sprite sheets that I could massage and label to see if I can make that work?

It's not a full dataset per say, but you might be interested in Sebastian Starke's DeepPhase work [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/wAbLsRymXe4

[2] https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation