This POTF Barada hardcopy/protomold hybrid first appeared in Collector Steve Sansweet's book, from From Concept to Screen Collectible in 1992.
Sansweet owned the action figure prototype for almost two decades. It was made entirely inside of Kenner. It came directly from the company’s basement injection molders and sculpting department at their headquarters on Vine Street, in Cincinnati Ohio some time in 1984.
The molds used to make the figure's head, arms and legs were machined and refined by hand, in house. As one company employee has stated, his boss told him that these aluminum or kirkstite molds needed to be polished by hand ’until you could see the monkey’.
The torso for the figure is a hardcopy, which was also created inside Kenner during a painstaking process that saw a sculpting employee carefully hand craft an RTV (room temperature vulcanizing) silicone mold, by casting directly from the character's original wax sculp torso. The resulting molds was carefully filled with 'dynacast', a hand mixed formula of ceramic resin, that was left to cure overnight.
All the parts of the action figure were then carefully refined and finished using sandpaper, and constructed into the complete figure using plastic pins to attach the head and limbs to the hardcopy torso. From there the figure was sanded again to remove remaining imperfections, and prepped for painting.
The creation of this figure enabled Kenner to rapidly produce multiple, injection and resin molded samples for the character before any other 3D representation was available.
Hybrid prototype figures such as this Barada paint master were used for color scheme approval and direction, as well as sales and marketing purposes that sometimes also included Toy Fair use and packaging or catalog photography. The swatches that come with it indicate that it was likely used principally for vendor instruction on the character's color scheme.
Because this use represented an important stage of toy creation, it was hand painted using a brush inside Kenner’s model shop, using cell vinyl paint, which is known best for its use on cartoon cells in the animation industry. As mentioned previously, the Barada figure was entirely assembled and finished by hand, and as a result will generally show fewer imperfections than the mass produced action figure. It is for all intents and purposes, hand crafted.