bboisvert

Oh, God. Could that suck any worse? I could spend a year listing the ways that sucked. I made it 90 minutes in and then bailed.

How can you screw up Oz? Seriously, even if you're going to mess with the story a bit (and the original novel is vague enough in parts that pretty much every film has to make some stuff up)... how do you mess it up this badly?

It won't scar them for life, but it definitely isn't written for the kiddies. Some of the language is harsh ("piss off" "bitch" etc.), there's some TV violence and implied torture, and there's strippers/hookers, etc. You know -- all the great stuff you'd expect from an Oz adaptation.

Frankly, I think kids would be bored to tears before they even get to those parts. It sucks.

JasonF

Man ... I've been looking forward to this since I heard about it. Now, I think I'm just going to delete it from my TiVo unwatched.

How do you cast Zooey Deschanel and Alan Cumming, yet still manage to screw things up?

cdollaz

In the show, do they really refer to the place as "the O.Z."?

Groucho

Ad nauseum.

GuessWho

SciFi Channel movies = MST3K fodder

Cellar Door

I made it about an hour into this before I finally gave up and cancelled it from my DVR schedule. It shot below even my worst expectations. The writing was so bad that even the decent actors came across poorly. It tried way too hard to be hip. D.G.? The O.Z.?!? Come on! This is going to be a huge embarrasment to everyone involved.

bboisvert

Absolutely.

Everything gets a stupid name to make it "cooler" than the source novel. Dorothy Gale = D.G., etc. They seem to have spent much more time renaming stuff than they did actually putting together an interesting story.

Robert Halmi (one of the exec producers) is quoted as having said Tin Man is a "bit darker. To make a classic understood by young people today you have to talk an entirely different language."

Yeah, they needed to do that with LotR and Narnia too.



I don't think they have the slightest clue about "young people today".

Jadzia

Wow, what's funny is that the TV Guide article I read made it sound like this was going to be cool. They talked about how Sci-Fi was banking on this becoming a classic and being shown every year. I decided to DVR it because I was so intrigued from the article (and I love me some Neal McDonough )

I haven't watched my recording yet, but my hopes have been dashed reading all these comments.

Groucho

Keeping in mind I've only seen the first part, the title makes no sense to me. It would be like calling Lord of the Rings "Pippin" or "Gimli".

Mordred

I'd watch it so long as they don't make The D.L. a good guy or replace the bling with something wack.

bboisvert

See, you're clearly just not a "young person today". Tin Man sounds cool. It sounds all cyberpunk and sci-fi. Get with the times, bud.

It doesn't matter that he seems to be nothing more than a bodyguard for the actual main character/Messiah D.G. Young people don't focus on main characters any more. It's all about the edges of the screen.

Rogue588

You're talking about this?:

Right, Neal. You keep thinking that.

I like Neal too (though, obviously not as much as you ), but that's a pretty goofy thing to say.

Jadzia

I'd still hit it...er, be hit by it.

bboisvert

I also love how everything compares this to the 1939 film, as if the MGM musical is the end-all-be-all.

Yes, that is a true classic. And, contrary to what McDonough says, I don't see that kids today see it as "kinda goofy". The kids I've seen watch it are just as enthralled as ever.


But, why does everyone ignore the novel? There's a pretty big selling 1900 book that all of this is ultimately based on. And it's a pretty fun children's fantasy novel. The 1939 version, while a classic, changed/omitted quite a bit from the source. There's plenty of room for interpretation/adaptation without feeling confined by the musical. And there's no need to modernize it as some sort of generic made-for-TV sci-fi film. That's just rationalizing the bad script and seriously misreading the audience.

Again -- Narnia and LotR somehow managed to pull in billions while maintaining true to the story and spirit of the source. For the actors and producers to pretend that Oz couldn’t do the same thing seems to be ignoring reality.

Chew

I haven't seen this yet and now I don't know if I even should.

Maybe I'll wait until people make it through the complete 6 hours to give me a better sense.

Groucho

Well said, bboisvert. Everybody wants to put out "modern" and/or "dark" versions of the Oz story. I'm more interested in something that stays relatively true to the original novel. That, in and of itself, would be quite different than anything that's been filmed to date.

Probably the closest film that's come to novels was Return to Oz. But that had a lot of flaws.

Panda Phil

To the person who asked if it was appropriate for schoolkids. Please do them a favor and go rent a copy of Return to Oz instead. You'll all be much happier.

This.

From what little I saw, they pulled another Flash Gordon out of their asses.

Find a writer who''s never seen or heard any material from the original stories, hand them a list of names and a brief synopsis of the universe and tell them to make sure to make the script as grim and charmless as possible.
Someone in a forum elsewhere nailed it I think when they called the process 'De-imagining'.

kenbuzz

Alas, you've hit it right on the head. They used to get it right (see Dune, Children of Dune and Battlestar Galactica for examples), but now we've got stuff like Frankenfish, Ice Spiders and Supergator to contend with.

Chew

Considering this was done by many of the same people as with Flash, I guess they didn't have far to reach.

Jadzia

I saw a minute of this last night. The funny thing is when I saw 'DG" my first thought was "What is Chuck from Pushing Daisies doing in this?"

Dobby

those 2 actresses DO look very much alike

I thought the second night was better then the first

squidget

another swing and miss by sci-fi. makes me sad, I wish they would spend time on doing a followup to lost room over wasting money on this dreck.

DRG

My problem with these type of reimaginations is that the people go overboard trying to be 'creative' or 'edgy' with twisting things around. But at the same time they wink too much at the original source. And this combination usually ends up as crap because it comes off as a transparent attempt to look edgy and still rope in fans of the source. "Hey everyone, it's the Scarecrow... but look what we've done to him!"

The only way something like this works is either 1) if you drastically change the characters/setting but the allusions to the original are subtle and not in-your-face, or 2) you stick to the original ideas for the most part and only subtly tweak the characters/setting.

MrE

Exactly how TIN MAN is working for me. It's got enough of the Oz stories to tie in, but with an intriguingly-skewed perspective. I've only made it through episode 2 but I'm liking the way they re-imagined this so far.

The plot is agreeably convoluted with surprising discoveries as it proceeds. I'm guessing the complainers haven't really been watching ... ?

SuperBatMan

I've tried to watch this on two seperate occasions, and got so incredibly embarassed that I was watching it, I turned it off. The Tin-Man looks like Indiana Jones? DG? The O.Z.? Flying monkeys out of breast tattoos? And then last night topped it off. Toto turns into a black man. WTF? This was like something made by a junior high class.