Il Manuale delle Giovani Marmotte

In June 2013, forty years after the first edition, Corriere della Sera reprinted two historic Disney manuals: “The Grandma Duck” manual and “The Young Marmots Handbook”.

Let’s take a step back. Those who were children between the sixties and seventies did not have Wikipedia or Google to inform themselves. They learned from school books, which were then called subsidiaries, listened to sound tales, leafed through “The Fifteen”, read the best sellers in the compendia of Selection from Reader’s Digest and did school research on encyclopedias in installments (La Motta, Le Muse, Galileo), duly bound and on display in the library of every family that intended to rise from the magma of ignorance.

But there was also another small source of information, full of original ideas, charm and adventure: the legendary “Handbook of Young Marmots”, in the 1969 edition.

Arnoldo Mondadori published eight volumes from 69 to 89, edited by Elisa Penna (cartoonist inventor of Paperinik) and Mario Gentilini, with illustrations by Giovan Battista Carpi. A Maxi manual was also released in 91 with the best of six volumes.

The young Marmots, or “Junior Woodchucks”, are a scouting group invented by Disney, based in Duckburg. It includes the nephews of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, Qui, Quo, Qua (with their Davy Crockett hats) and the chief named Gran Mogol.

If Grandma Duck’s manual was designed for girls and presented tasty recipes, unforgettable and universally appreciated by both males and females remains the Young Marmots manual. In fiction, it represented the compendium of all the knowledge preserved in the library of Alexandria, which has come down to us through numerous vicissitudes that had enriched its content. There were notions of history, geography, survival: from the construction of a bridge, to the lighting of a fire, to the translations of the same sentence into various languages. Confidently known as the Infallible, it was supplied, in pocket format, to the young marmots who used it to solve intricate cases.

The actual manual, the one printed by Mondadori in 69, featured Disney characters and was a practical aid for every child. It possessed its own didactic charm, including secret codes (such as the legendary Dada Urka), information on how to build a kite or whistle, explanations on the Morse alphabet and the main knots. However, it also contained concrete suggestions with a moral intent typical of the time, on how to present the report card to parents or not to abuse the telephone. It was designed for the outdoors and taught respect for nature and animals.

It let us dream of adventures bigger than us, talking about vanished civilizations, hieroglyphs and distant places, it taught us how to do things with our hands (a bit like the mythical volume number 9 of “The Fifteen”) making us feel less alone, suggesting that, if we we were in difficulty, abandoned to ourselves and without the presence of an adult — perhaps lost in a forest with no orientation — we would have found support in the little book, ready and pocket-sized, capable of explaining how to solve problems by ourselves, finding resources in ourselves, activating our hidden energies. Those same energies that were nothing but the strength to grow and become, for better or for worse, what we are today.