New Oz Legend Mystifying and Dazzling

My wife has been looking forward to the new Sci-Fi miniseries Tin Man. Tonight I got roped into watching it with her and I must say – I’m rather impressed. I’ve never been a Wizard of Oz fan. It’s too goody goody for me. But I like some of the things that the movie has produced. The Wiz, for example, was a creative adaptaion many years ago. And more recently, the musical and book Wicked focused on an entirely new aspect of the family movie. But Tin Man is a completely different approach…and it has me hooked.

For one thing, Dorothy is played by a girl with big blue eyes – a weakness of mine. She played one of Santa’s mall elves in Will Ferrell’s Elf and she is also the sister of the title character in Bones.

The story takes place in “The O-Z,” a comical take on Fox’s The OC. The O-Z stands for “The Outer Zone” and it was a peaceful place before the witch got a hold of it. Dorothy is a modern day character that even cusses (in one scene, she says “What the hell?”) and waits tables in the opening scene before the infamous tornado strikes the town.

The scarecrow character isn’t the typical scarecrow but instead is a crazy-haired quirky guy with a zipper in his head. He is known as the “head case” – a person whose brain was torn out because he was a criminal. As his punishment, he is doomed to be a prisoner of his own mind.

The title character is a sheriff that was locked inside of “tin box” with a window in it. He was forced to watch his family be tortured and killed. When he is released several years later, he is numb of feeling but tends to retain a heart of gold.

And who can forget about the Cowardly Lion. In this adaptation, he is a man with overgrown hair and a gruff appearance. He is also a “viewer,” meaning that he can see the the future and he can see into the hearts of people by touching them.

Then, in an unexpected move, acting icon Richard Dreyfuss plays the part of the Wizard. In this series, however, he is known as “The Mystic Man” – the man with all the answers. The group meets him in a nightclub-like setting in which he entertains the crowd with his mystic persona. Backstage, however, he is simply the shell of a man he once was.

All of the bad things that befall the main characters are the direct result of the sorceress Azkadellia. And the plot thickens at the end of the episode, but I tended to lose interest right about that time. There’s something about a two-hour episode that drains my one-hour attention span. But since it’s a miniseries, a second episode will be on tomorrow night at 9 PM. And like cable channel fashion, they will be replaying the first episode immediately following tonight’s episode and again tomorrow immediately before the second episode, so there’s plenty of chances to get caught up.

Although I am enamored by the creativity and the plot of the story, some of the special effects are cheesy, but that’s just typical of any production on the Sci-Fi channel. You can tell that the munchkins were simply standing in front of a green screen in order to make them look smaller than what they are. The animals that attack the quartet of characters are obviously computerized and unrealistic. But that’s just typical of productions on this channel.

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