And I WILL make ya laugh

Watch Legacy - Part 1 in Family  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

This Sunday's Gospel Doctrine lesson details the first groups of Mormon pioneers to cross the plains to Utah. When I think about the pioneers, of course I think of faithful and inspiring people like Stillman Pond, whose sacrifices benefit me spiritually and temporally. But I also think of two other things.

The first is the groups of teenage Mormons and their parents and leaders who go "on trek." Without fail, every single person talks about going "on trek"--not on A trek, but on trek, like it's a registered trademark, capital-T Trek run by some handcart company who trademarked the term. It's a silly thing that annoys me way more than it should, but there you go.

The other thing I think about is the movie Legacy, the first Church-produced movie shown in what is now called the Legacy Theater in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building on Temple Square. It certainly has the potential to inspire, but I've seen it enough times now (and my personality is such) that I mostly focus on the cornier aspects of it.

I'd like to write a running diary of the movie (a format used to great comedic effect by Bill Simmons and others), but here's the thing: it's practically been scrubbed from the Internet. It used to be on YouTube, but no more. Years ago I heard some rumors about the person who played Joseph Smith, but even if they were all true it doesn't seem like that would be reason enough to erase the movie from the Web. If anyone knows more details about this, I'd be interested to find out.

As you can see above, I did finally find Legacy on a different video site...but I cold only watch a 5-minute clip unless I downloaded their player. I'm hoping that y'all can view the embedded version in this post without having to download potentially iffy software. So if I get some comments indicating that the video is viewable, then I'll do this running diary in a future post. Let me know!