Oh...I just wanted to say a little something as an aside about prototypes and why companies protect them so carefully, too.
I did work for a brief time in the field of toymaking and the sculpting firm I worked for was lucky enough to be doing work for one of the licensees for the Lord of the Rings movies. My boss there informed me that each of the prototypes we were crafting, after all of the costs of time, labor, materials and tooling (the technology used to create replicas) were factored in, each prototype was valued at about $30,000. Yes, THIRTY GRAND! That is how important these one-of-a-kind items are to the company! Those prototypes were so valuable that I was not allowed to remove them from the premesis (like I would) or even photograph them for my portfolio. The licensee we were working for paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right to make LOTR toys...it is a case of THEM going to the owners of the LOTR property and pitching their products and paying for the right to make money off the license, not the owners of the LOTR property going out and finding people to make their wares.
To put this in the perspective of Rainbow Brite, though I think the values would be much lower for the prototypes (just due to licensing costs, no having to pay fees for likenesses, inflation ect), each one of these wonderful items Galacticatt has found for her private collection represent a huge investment by Mattel at the time that, in the case of the unreleased items, they never received a return on.
Another story about the importance of guarding prototype property like this actually comes from the early days of Mattel, before they even rolled out the Barbie doll. As some of you may know, the name Mattel comes from Matthew and Elliot, the first names of the two men who made the company (Matt Handler's wife, Ruth, was the inventor of Barbie). In the early days of their partnership they made furniture including doll furniture. They came up with an idea to build a small ukelele (musical instrument) for kids to expand their line. This toy that they called a "Uke a Doodle," they shopped around to a few producers before deciding just to make themselves. At the annual toy fair, when they unveiled the Uke a Doodle, they were chagrined to discover that one of the producers they had been to earlier in the year had ripped off their design and was also showing their own toy ukelele. In fact, their prototype was just a Mattel Uke a Doodle with the name scratched off.
So, yes, Mattel learned early on to guard their intellectual property VERY closely!
He probably thinks I am a nut or afraid of Mattel- (I suspect that prototypes belong to the company, so there are probably rules about selling them/taking them home) -working with a professional third-party dealer probably feels safer. 
