Chernobog strides atop a seething volcano of green magma. A demon of Mephistophelian measure, his eyes are slits of light carved into a dark-hued visage, craggy horns and teeth curling up into a twisted grimace of netherworldly glee. He plays upon the lesser beings below like a puppeteer, the whole of it set before a backdrop of massive leathery black wings and flowing to the ominous strains of Moussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain."
The scene is from the movie Fantasia. It is an image on a silver screen, and yet it is all too real. More than a half-century old, this smoky vision of Hell has lost none of its power to spark fantastical dreams.
Mike Glad, IE '68, is in the business of gathering these dreams. In just the past 15 years, this former Georgia Tech football player has amassed the most diverse collection of animation art in the world, encompassing more than 3,000 images from films produced in all corners of the globe. The features and shorts from which he owns images include titles like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Yellow Submarine, Superman, Gerald McBoing Boing, Gulliver's Travels and Felix the Cat, just to name a fraction.
Far more than just a gallery of cels, Glad's collection is an amalgamation of the art itself, a study in each phase of animated feature production, from the initial idea to the finished product. "In an animated film, the process goes from conception to camera, and there are lots and lots of steps," Glad says. "Inspirational artists are probably the people I enjoy the most, or the color stylists-the people who are working on the styling and the mood."
Talking of the Fantasia scene described above, Glad's gravelly voice picks up tempo as he digs his way back to the Disney classic's nascence. "What's this supposed to look like? How's it going to flow?" he asks. "They hire a great artist to come in and, boom, he'll sketch these great things. What's always fun is if the conceptual art translates 100 percent to screen. Then you know it's a great job."
Glad's road from coach Bobby Dodd's defensive line to the company of world-class art collectors has been long and not without curves. Upon graduation, he worked for DuPont and Southern Railway in Atlanta before deciding to take the plunge into entrepreneurship. He scouted around for different opportunities in franchise business and found an urban Midas Muffler location near San Francisco.
"I said, hey, I've got a chance to do something on my own, independent of constraints, so why not try? I was getting pretty comfortable where I was at, and I knew that if I didn't make a transition then, that my comfort level would overcome my motivation to do something."
Today, Glad owns 13 Midas shops in and around San Francisco and Fresno, Calif. He is proud of his business, quoting a recent survey he'd seen claiming 51 percent of auto mechanics would rather be doing something else. He mentions this and follows it with the fact that no manager of any of his stores has less than seven years seniority. "That we can create that kind of environment in a business such as auto repair, which typically has a negative connotation in the public eye, I think says something."
Glad lives in Fremont, close to San Francisco, with his wife, Jeanne, and three children-Stephanie, 17, Michael, 15, and Daniel, 12. He recently celebrated his 49th birthday, and though he speaks with a businessman's calculated demeanor when discussing his "day job," it is apparent that Mike Glad's true passion lies closer to the world of pencils and watercolors than that of mufflers and brakes.
As a child in the 1950s, he frequented the Disneyland Art Corner in Anaheim, Calif. And on one such visit, with $5 burning a hole in the 9-year-old's pocket, Glad purchased a Jiminy Cricket cel from Pinocchio and thus penciled the first sketch of what would become the artistic vision of his life.
But Glad put his interest in animation aside for nearly 30 years, until a visit to a shop in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1982 began to color in the faded outline of his fascination. Not much was known about this kind of art then; the shop owners often knew less about the cels they carried than Glad did.
He began to read anything he could get his hands on concerning the animation process and collectibles. One of the first books he read, and still considers the most influential to his attitude, was Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic. Though there was only a handful of books available on the subject back then compared to many hundreds today, Glad started developing a keen eye for what a quality collection should contain.
His own days of being a collector really got started in 1983, when he bought nearly all of Jerome Muller's 102-piece collection that had been exhibited for four years in more than 30 museums. "When I saw [Muller's] collection, I knew it had some depth and meaning," Glad says. "It was purposely put together, and I had enough knowledge by then to understand that. So I thought, 'If Jerry's collection was good, just think what I can do.'"
The metamorphosis animated films undergo en route from concept to screen involves much more than just a series of drawings. The "cels" that are the most commonly known and collected stage of this process are hand-painted drawings on acetate, which then are laid over backgrounds to form frames in the motion picture. Often, several layers of separate cels and backgrounds make up the image one sees on the screen.
Glad himself feels cels are "probably the least interesting artistic component" of a film. Many of his favorite pieces-ask him and he will reel off an honor roll of great animators and their works-are sketches done early in pre-production, tantalizing hints to the creative genesis behind some of the most famous images in the world. Each step is vital, and thus pieces from each step are necessary in building a truly comprehensive collection.
"What I look for is the importance of the film and the importance of the image to the film," Glad says. "Let's take Lady and the Tramp; the sequence where they're eating spaghetti in the alley-that's the scene everybody remembers, so that's the image you want to acquire. But there's only one, and only one person can own it." And then he adds slyly, "But I did get it, so that's it."
This may sound simple enough when dealing with popular films, but things get a bit murkier when Glad is trying to nail down a single image from, say, an obscure Russian or Chinese animated feature from years before.
"Obviously, for something like The Tale of Tales, Yuri Norstein's great film, it's darn hard," Glad says. "And you're sure not going to get any help determining the great moment of the film because no one's seen it. In that case, I try to obtain the painting that offers the greatest artistic component to it."
The sheer volume of animation that's out there to be collected is staggering to comprehend. Putting aside the amount of work done by the major American producers-Disney, Warner Brothers, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), UPA and Columbia-there are scores of studios around the world producing mountains of work never before seen in the West.
"The Soviet Union had a huge animation system," Glad says. "Each state had a studio-there were 14 or 16 studios in Russia, all state-supported and all producing animation. They produced more animation than Disney, Warner and MGM put together, and no one knows about it."
Other major players internationally were the former Yugoslavia's Zagreb Studio (which no longer exists) and Canada's National Film Board. Most countries in Europe, certainly Japan, Australia, China, Cuba-all these nations produce vast quantities of animation, all there for the discriminating collector to sift through.
But, in terms of American art, the studio that stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of impact is the one made famous by a certain Mouse. "The one doing the vast majority of successful features-I'm talking pre-1990-was Disney," Glad says. "So, if you look at a U.S.-based collection, 50 percent of your material objectively has to be from Disney, and the rest is scattered around."
Much of Glad's collecting now is focused around the exhibits and shows he puts together once or twice each year. For instance, he currently is working on an exhibit of artwork from the film Dumbo to highlight the March 10 opening of the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Fla., this country's only stand-alone museum devoted exclusively to this artform. Glad also sits on the museum's board of directors, along with noted artists Jim Davis (the creator of the "Garfield" comic strip), Mort Walker ("Beetle Bailey"), Mike Peters ("Mother Goose and Grimm"), Will Eisner ("The Spirit," a comic book) and Arnold Roth (illustrator for The New Yorker), among others.
Gamesmanship plays no small part in the construction of a world-class collection of any sort of memorabilia, and Glad has become quite skilled at it. Animation collectors form a close fraternity and compete among themselves for the prizes; call it a game, the gamepieces shaped like Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker, the stakes tailed with many zeroes.
As he built his Dumbo collection, Glad practiced careful sniping. He knew a man who purchased a large collection that had been languishing in storage for 50 years, many Dumbo pieces contained therein. Instead of offering to buy the floppy-eared-elephant-related art outright, Glad for two years "tapped away at the outside of the collection," picking a cel here, a sketch there, slowly tugging at the edges.
"I get it down to where he has only 10 pieces left," Glad says. "All along I knew it was going to get to this point. I knew his achilles' heel, and I found in my collection a Mickey directing the heavens from the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence in Fantasia. So I say to him, 'I'm doing this Dumbo show, and I've only got two weeks left-are you interested in a swap?'" Done deal.
"I nailed it," Glad laughs at recalling his elephantine coup. "But I had to pick away at the outside of it before I could get to the heart of it. That's the kind of game you're constantly playing. Money is rarely the solution; the key to making a deal with a major collector is finding something they want more than what they have that you want."
Money itself is a sketchy issue in animation collecting. When dealing with rare cultural artifacts worth astronomical sums, the precise dollar value of a piece is a somewhat nebulous number and often irrelevant to its owner. For instance, the most important piece in Glad's collection is a black-and-white cel and background of a 1934 Disney short called "The Orphans' Benefit."
Several factors determine a cel's worth. The "Orphans' Benefit" piece is prized because (1) it features Mickey Mouse, who is almost certainly the most popular cartoon character in history; (2) it is black and white-after 1935, Disney produced only color features and shorts, and the studio often erased older black and white cels to reuse the acetate sheets; (3) it's an establishing shot from the first scene; and (4) it is "key," which means this cel and this background actually appeared together in the film-sometimes cels and backgrounds will be matched up for sale in combinations that never saw light on the screen.
"It sums up that pre-1935 era when Mickey was King," Glad says. "Mickey had evolved into the goodest of good guys, and things were about to get a lot more complicated after that." He balks at gauging its actual worth but says he would insure it for seven figures, should he ever allow it to leave its place of safekeeping.
"But I don't know if I could sell it for seven figures-I probably couldn't," Glad says. "But that doesn't matter, because if you came in and offered me a million dollars for it, I wouldn't sell it to you. You don't sell the jewel out of the center of the crown."
That cel is just one of several worth enough to trade for a small mansion in Glad's collection. He stresses that it was his relatively early entry into animation collecting that allowed him to build this sort of portfolio. Back in the early 1980s, not many people knew what cels were, much less the value they would come to attain.
"I just happened to be there at a time just before it exploded," he says. "Today there are galleries in Atlanta or any other big city that sell animation art, but I bet you in 1982 there weren't. People sold it, but you would never walk in anywhere and see it hanging on the walls."
Mike Glad is not in this business solely to build a wealth of assets. He speaks humbly, almost reverently, of the people responsible for these colorful sheets of acetate. The superlatives flow like ink from a pen when he speaks of such animation talents as Eyvind Earle, Ward Kimball and Marc Davis, or of late Disney greats like Kay Nielsen, Gustaf Tenggren and Mary Blair.
"One of the greatest things I was able to do was meet and get to know many of the artists," Glad says. "And there are a lot of them who aren't around anymore."
They may not be around, but they would be glad to know their lives' work is in good hands.