I find these threads funny, but I'm going to throw my 2 cents of what I know.
Most of Mormon theology is, at least superficially, similar to Christian fundamentalist theology. Smith, after all, grew up in communities that had similar churches, so he would've been well exposed to the stuff. However, what's amusing is the nature of the way in which the religion was revealed.
Revealed religions include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They have a legendary origin in which the tenets of the religion are revealed from a divine source. In Islam, for example, it was when the Archangel Gabriel came to Mohammed. Mormonism is also a revealed religion. It is claimed that J. Smith received several documents, in the form of golden plates, from the angel Moroni, which were written in ancient Egyptien hieroglyphs. Smith also received two magical translation stones with which to decipher the text. This all occured about 1830 in upstate NY, in the town of Palmyra.
Although at the time, Egyptian hieroglyphs had been translated (thanks to the Rosetta stone) in Europe, news of this was slow to reach North America, especially into hick towns like Palmyra. So J. Smith thought he was coming up with something amazing, when in fact, Champollion had already figured out Egyptian writing in 1810. Supposedly, Smith had a (male) secretary that would take dictation while Smith would recite the revelations that were coming to him from the stones, as he'd "translate" the text. The secretary's wife wasn't buying the story of revelation through ancient Egyptian text, and destroyed her husband's dictations, saying "If he's so good at translating, let him do it again and see if he gets the same story." Let's just say that the second version wasn't the same.
(this is mostly hearsay anyway)
Part of the amusement of the Book of Mormon is that its language style is similar to the KJV of the Bible, even though English of that sort was 200 years out of date. You'd think that if you translated anything, even ancient Egyptian, properly, you'd translate it into the English of your own time.
The Golden Plates have not been publically seen for a long time. Apparently, the church elders that succeeded Smith stowed it away, for safe keeping, lest someone actually decipher it accurately. Be that as it may, some old photographs of some of the plates did make it out. When real Egyptologists attempted to decipher the text, they realized that it was actually excerpts from the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead is essentially a manual to the preserved mummy on how to make one's way to the afterlife. It describes what one should expect in the next life, including the judgement of Osiris by the weighing of the heart against a feather, to determine one's moral fortitude. You can guess that none of this is in the Book of Mormon.
I've already mentioned the references to alien visitation and Kolob.
Finally, there is the interesting matter of polygamy and racism. Polygamy was once doctrine of LDS, however, it no longer is. Only a few fringe groups still practice it, and they are not recognized as legit by the Church. The reason given is that it was a reinterpretation of doctrine, but the real reason is that the federal government refused to grant Utah admission into the Union as a state as long as polygamy was practiced. A similar situation occured with racism. Until about 1960, racism was written into doctrine as the "curse of Ham." After the civil rights act was passed in 1964, the church was investigated for racism, because it wanted to continue to be recognized as tax-exempt, as all other religions in the US. Once again, this doctrine was lifted. This is why nearly all Mormons you see proselytizing, while wearing those spiffy suits, mind you, are white.
