"Tin Man," on SciFi. It's a six hour miniseries that reimagines The Wizard of Oz, where "reimagines" means "craps on."

I'm an Oz fan. I've read all the original Baum books, and followed quite a few Oz-inspired revamps. As I understand it, with the Oz works long in the public domain, any old Winkie can publish their own variant. I've seen good adaptations and bad adaptations, and SciFi's Tin Man is definitely on the bad side. The Deadly Desert side.

I think there's more success than failure in the world of Oz cloning, but maybe I'm just a fanboy. For all of its flaws, the 1939 Judy Garland film does not do a terrible job at a surface-level Oz movie, although it left no opening for the larger world of the Oz books. Disney's Return to Oz is similarly not-terrible, and loops in some of Baum's best second-string characters. DC Comics' Zoo Crew did a very nice Oz storyline.

The comic book Oz Squad (a child and victim of the comic book industry's black & white explosion) is absolutely fantastic, precisely the kind of reimagining I enjoy: something that could potentially fit inside the existing canon but develops the world into something more. Oz Squad turns an adult Dorothy Gale into the leader of a security detail that guards and polices the border between our world and Oz. The first issue revealed that mechanical man Tik-Tok has a hidden interior Morality spring that had unwound, so Tik-Tok goes batshit and starts throwing babies off a building. I've probably mentioned Oz Squad before. Check it out.

And, you know, the novel Wicked is pretty damn cool for just that same reason. The continuity thing, not the Tik-Tok / babies thing.

But on to complaining!

"Tin Man" is a complete reboot. D.G. is a starry-eyed post-teen with dreams bigger than her rural town. She falls into "the O.Z." when the evil queen sends a kill squad through the rift after her. Naturally, she first meets Munchkins (now human Ewoks), then the Scarecrow equivalent (not an actual scarecrow, but a guy with half his brain removed)... whom this iteration annoyingly renames "Glitch." Because his brain doesn't quite work right, ha ha. Alan Cumming plays Glitch and although he's one of those actors who is good in anything, he has a lot of awful to slog through.

The Tin Woodsman is a former city cop who dresses like a cowboy. Not a robot or a cyborg or even a guy in armor. The "tin" refers to a sheriff's star. I have no idea why the entire miniseries is named after him. When we first meet up with him, he is imprisoned in a diving suit, mourning the death of his wife and child. He is cold and bent on revenge. A man without a heart, you see.

The Cowardly Lion is from a race of furry psychics who possess the ability to read minds and then project those images into mirrors. Yeah, things start sucking pretty soon. Whenever the lion-guys (there's a couple of them) have to do their thing, it's like the characters are being forced to watch their own sucky movie.

Their quest takes them through loads of Lord of the Rings-style scenes as they evade the wicked queen and uncover D.G.'s secret past. And tons of obvious, barely tolerable dialogue.

One of the very first scenes has grumpy, fiesty D.G. half-listening to her hayseed father go on about the simple life he enjoyed as a child. "Aw, Daaaaad." You could write this movie.

And even if you acquire a taste for the cliches, you still have to stumble through the weak CG, inconsistent character skills, and the ham-handed references to the 1939 movie. (Yes, they ref Lions, Tigers and Bears. >sigh<)

About halfway through the third hour, I started feeling really bad for the actors. You can feel them trying so damn hard (particularly Alan Cumming) to make the script work, but it's just crappy. I was there because I dig Oz stuff.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that "Tin Man" instantly limits itself by sticking with only elements from the Judy Garland movie. Baum's books are filled with memorable characters, from the Hungry Tiger to Jack Pumpkinhead to the Nome King. Aside from a couple fanciful elements and a Harry Potter-esque attitude of "Let's talk a lot about magic but never really do much of it," this is just a bunch of LARPers at Mardi Gras.

SciFi jammed this six-hour miniseries into three nights, and not even during the sweep. That tells me that they did not have a lot of faith in this production.

For a certain age, "Tin Man" is probably rollicking good entertainment. But, given SciFi's usual demographic, it seems like a wide miss.