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Basic Facts:

Episodes: 3
Runtime: 90 min.
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Premiered: 2007

Format:

Mini series

Genres:

Adventure, Fantasy

Created By:

Craig Van Sickle, Steven Long Mitchell

Actors:

Alan Cumming, Callum Keith Rennie, Ian A. Wallace, Kathleen Robertson, Neal McDonough, Raoul Trujillo, Richard Dreyfuss, Ted Whittall, Zooey Deschanel

Made In:

USA

Premiered at:

SyFy

Tin Man mini series is real treat. At first I thought that it’s a remake of the Wiz­ard Of Oz (and remakes are usu­ally bad idea to make in the first place), but the Tin Man is much more. And also, to my sur­prise, story is bet­ter than the orig­i­nal story of Oz, and is actu­ally con­tin­u­a­tion of the orig­i­nal story, set some 50–60 years after, but much more mod­ern­ized, with some ele­ments changes includ­ing change from Oz to O.Z.

Kath­leen Robert­son as Azkadellia

Pro­duc­tion

This is prob­a­bly the best mini series made by SyFy so far. It costed more than 20 mil­lion dol­lars to make and that is a big bud­get for tele­vi­sion. And it’s easy to see how well that money has spent, from great cast, expen­sive visu­als and to top it very good story. Let’s hope that SyFy will con­tinue to make wor­thy pro­duc­tion instead of the low bud­get TV movies they still make.

Story

As I said, story is set some 50 years after the Wiz­ard Of Oz events. There is no Dorothy, but instead of her we have a DG, and she finds her­self in the mys­ti­cal lands of O.Z, where she sets on the adven­ture to find her par­ents. And she meets 3 com­pan­ions and they are also on sort of a quest. But, DG quest for par­ents turned out to be much more dif­fi­cult, and she need to save the O.Z from infi­nite darkness.

On the other side of O.Z., we have Azkadel­lia and she uses magic and tech­nol­ogy to rule the O.Z. But, her role evolves dur­ing the 3 episodes, and turns out to be much more than sim­ply evil antag­o­nist to DG. She keeps her mother, the real Queen pris­oner while she seeks to find Emer­ald of the Eclipse to bring dark­ness to O.Z.

Mod­ern ver­sion adds many ele­ments of sci­ence fic­tion, fan­tasy and even today very pop­u­lar steam­punk genre mak­ing the story more appeal­ing to the younger audi­ence that maybe didn’t even see the orig­i­nal movie.

Tin­Man cast

Cast

Zooey Deschanel plays DG, and for the most part, she did good job, even though she looks con­fused most of the time, maybe too much than char­ac­ter required. Azkadellia is by far my favorite char­ac­ter of the series, and gor­geous Kath­leen Robert­son is great in the role. She was crit­i­cized to be to seri­ous in the role, but I think is fit­ting espe­cially when you see the ending.

DG trav­el­ing com­pan­ions are also Glitch (played by Alan Cum­ming), who is search­ing for his brain, Wyatt Cain (great Neal McDo­nough) who is for­mer police­man of the O.Z., or Tin Man and he is look­ing for his familiy, Raw (played by Raoul Tru­jillo) belong­ing to race of view­ers and he is sim­i­lar to orig­i­nal Cow­ardly Lion. And for the end I would like to men­tion Richard Drey­fuss as The Mys­tic Man (Wiz­ard Of Oz from the orig­i­nal), who has a small role here, but good one.

Con­clu­sion

This is great mini series, and with DVD released with Blu-​Ray on the way, this is a real good title to pur­chase for col­lec­tion. And with over 4 hours in lenght, series never gets bor­ing. If you have a chance, you defin­i­tively need to see this one.