Smithology

Tin Man was shown over the Christmas holidays here on channel 7 and I recorded it as I have been having some kind of spooky confluence with all things Wizard of Oz for a few months now where I keep coming across references to the story. I recently borrowed some of the Oz books off Catriona but seeing as I was reading The Merchants’ War and catching up on BSG, I haven’t read them yet.

On watching Tin Man it soon becomes apparent that we are not in Kansas anymore in more ways than one. It is clear from about the five minute mark that this is more than just a modernisation of the story and that it departs in many ways from the story as we know it according to the 1939 movie (which doesn’t exactly follow the books either I’m told). The plot roughly follows the original and the characters are roughly resembling the originals but the details are all different.

While this show had a definite B-grade feel about it, I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s the script, maybe it’s the pace. Perhaps it’s that Dorothy, sorry D.G. is supposed to be eighteen but acts more like she’s twelve. Even though this is supposed to be a fantastic story taking place in a fantasy world, maybe the fantasy aspect of it was just too much: it’s just really hard to mix a fantasy world with a real world character without needing a million scenes where the real world character is just gazing about open mouthed at everything. Or maybe it was kind of how a lot of the focus was just on showing us all this neat special effects.

Actually, now that I think about it, the real problem was that they failed to really develop any of the relationships between the characters. The best parts of the series were when these relationships were being fleshed out such as the scenes where Glitch and Cain end up travelling together. The conversations between Glitch and Cain on this journey were the best parts of the script.

To me the special effects looked really good. The settings all looked pretty awesome whether it was the forest or Azkadellia’s steam-punk castle or the lake. The flying monkeys looked real enough (and the way they erupted from Azkadellia’s bosoms had a lot of entertainment value) as did the other fantastic creatures.

Despite the flaws I just mentioned, the story still had me engrossed enough that I wanted to see what happened and whether the wicked witch would end with a melting scene rivalling Raiders of the Lost Ark’s melting Nazi (but it’s a PG rating so you can guess that the melting scene was not very impressive). The end is very predictable but at least they threw in a little tie back to the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie towards the end which kind of came out of nowhere. (There’s also a hot air balloon which really literally comes out of nowhere and with no explanation which I assume is just from very bad editing to try and fit it into a timeslot).

All in all, if you’ve got six hours to waste and you like Wizard of Oz stuff, then I reckon you’ll enjoy watching Tin Man even if it’s just to play “spot the deconstructed reference to the original” or groan at the jokes in the script.

Links:
Tin Man IMDB
Tin Man Scfi.com
Tin Man Wikipedia

[tags]tin man, tv, wizard of oz[/tags]

tv, wizard of oz