Tin Man

I was looking through the television guide the other day and saw an advertisement for a new series on the Sci-Fi Channel. I thought I would record it just to see what it was like.

The series in question is a rework of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz story called Tin Man.

I watched the first episode and wasn't impressed. I'll give the second episode a chance but I am not holding out much hope on it.

It's about a girl called DG (Get it? Dorothy Gale) and her parents are holding back a big secret from her. This secret is that she is the sister of an evil sorceress in a parallel universe. To cut the long story short, she ends up falling into a tornado to escape soldiers from this alternative universe and find out that her parents on earth are robots and her real mother is in the weird world.

It is really far-fetched.

The intertextuality between this show and the original story gives me mixed thoughts. There are moments when I think they were clever with their references but at other times I cringe at the over-use.

For instance, the place they find themselves in is called the 'Outer Zone' otherwise known as 'The O.Z.' The scarecrow rip-off is a guy who had half his brain taken out by the baddies in the story and the lionesque (if there was such a word) character - which is more of a savage human - is called Raw. The Tin Man isn't made from tin but he was found encased in a futuristic kind of iron maiden. He is called a Tin Man because that is what the police are called in the Outer Zone.

I'm not doing a good job building myself up to watch the second part am I?

There was one scene in the initial episode that I don't know whether the line used was clever or corny. The Tin Man was urged to 'have a heart'.

I'm leaning on corny.