Scott Guilledge / Scroll
American Mormon was released Sept. 6 and is available at the BYU-I Bookstore. Junior’s Giants, released late August, is available at Deseret Book.

Two new LDS movie releases find immediate niche

Holly Arndt ARN02002@BYUI.EDU Scroll Staff

‘Junior’s Giants’
go to 'American Mormon' review

Cartoons with morals these days are so much cooler than they were in the 1980s. In fact, the most moral cartoons BYU-Idaho students remember watching during pre-elementary school days probably involved a coyote and an ACME anvil.

The new cartoon, Junior’s Giants, by Divine Comedy Productions, offers much more than a ballet of desert-dwelling animals trying to kill each other.

In fact, it delivers the perfect mix of Christian values and disco dancing, a combination some may not have ever known they sought after.

Junior is an inquisitive primary kid recently acquainted with the tale of David and Goliath, who lives with his parents, older sister and younger brother.

Junior’s mother is a highly organized Christian woman with the hippest cartoon highlights ever drawn.

His father prides himself on the workings of the home’s plumbing system, his sister is an overzealous, greedy “Girl Sprout” cookie saleswoman and his baby brother constantly scales the furniture with the aid of an ever-present spoon.

However docile Junior’s home life may seem, he’s got his issues just like every other short, fluffy-haired middle child. One of the toughest challenges Junior battles is the one with his temper, losing it periodically throughout the day.

Reminiscent of David and Goliath, Junior fights a Leprechaun-like, bagpipe-toting, disco-dancing giant named Tude (short for attitude, of course) that represents his own temper.

At first, Junior doesn’t want to fight a giant that seems so small (get it?), but through the fighting dream sequences with sunny skies carrying the occasional ice-cream cone or dinosaur-shaped cloud, Junior realizes that this Tude may be small, but it’s a giant nonetheless.

Junior’s Giants incites laughing, thinking, and wowing friends with stunning new one-liners. Watch it and learn. Glean what can be gleaned.

Control emotional outbursts. Climb the fridge with a spoon. Make insane amounts of money selling cookies, and of course, try to figure out how to get hair highlights that are as happening as those of Junior’s mom.

‘American Mormon’

Finally, a movie exists that incorporates the unvarnished reality of Super-size Me with the tasty LDS hilarity of The Singles’ Ward. At last, unabashed truth unveiled, delivered by a tall, thin Ricks College alumnus.

American Mormon, the new documentary from Nick Moe Productions (haha…punny!) hosted by Daryn Tufts and Jed Knudsen, is here to the rescue of American Mormons (and everyone else) and it may change Sunday afternoons forever.

In a fairly quick blitz (the whole DVD lasts only 35 mins.) through the United States, Tufts interviews random pedestrians about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons.

Inquiring on Mormon doctrine, history and leadership, our friendly LDS interviewers heard just about anything and everything.

When one totally hang-loose dude was asked, “What do you know about the Mormons?” he thoughtfully mused, “Something about lizard people and John Smith.”

 Another woman informed Tufts that Mormons “aren’t really into the big technology,” explaining that they “certainly” wouldn’t have telephones or computers.

Tufts even interviewed an Amish man who relayed the notion that Latter-day Saints aren’t allowed to eat chocolate.

“Maybe five times in your life, you’ll see a film so important that it forever alters your perspective. This would be a good movie to watch afterwards,” Daryn Tufts, American Mormon star, boasts.

The film, however, may have more clout than this DVD case quote suggests, at least with Latter-day Saints themselves.

Despite the humorous, lighthearted tone of the piece as a whole, American Mormon shows that the Church is indeed quite respected among average American pedestrians willing to do interviews with skinny Utah boys.

And, perhaps the making of this film will serve as a form of missionary work. Throughout the film, Tufts asks interviewees if they have one piece of advice or message to the Mormon people.

When one woman admits to not having any such message, Tufts replies, “Well, they have a message for you.”

With any luck, American Mormons can take the information presented in this film and set out to dispel the misunderstandings so many have about us.

That is, if Mormons are allowed to talk to strangers.

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