A yellow brick road not taken

Surely no American work of children’s literature occupies a deeper place in the cultural heart and mind than “The Wizard of Oz”: Its characters sit comfortably beside such venerable fairy-tale figures as Snow White and Jack and the Beanstalk, who seem to have been around something like forever, and not merely 107 years.

Even before Judy Garland dropped a house on Munchkinland, L. Frank Baum’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” had given rise to more than three dozen “official” sequels and had been produced multiple times for stage and screen. For figures so iconic, so memorable and so useful, it was inevitable that they would continue to live and that they’d be made at times to serve other ends than their creator could have imagined. There have been “Oz”-inspired cartoons and comics, novels and musicals. The Muppets took a crack at it. David Lynch made it the spine of his movie “Wild at Heart.”

The latest working-over is the Sci Fi Channel miniseries “Tin Man,” which begins a three-night run Sunday. It is not, as I had expected before actually watching it, a revisionist or sideways or more adult view of one of the story’s supporting players, along the lines of “Wicked” (the book, the musical); rather, it squeezes the Oz story through a filter woven from “Star Wars,” “The Lord of the Rings” and other scraps of pop mythology too numerous to mention.

Written by the team of Craig W. Van Sickle and Steven Long Mitchell (“The Pretender”) as both a variation on and a sequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” it dresses in Oz-ean gear the familiar story of a world ruled by a power-mad dictator, whose shock troops are battled by plucky rebels and whose fortunes turn with the arrival of a Chosen One, who comes from the skies to fulfill her unsuspected destiny. It has been produced by the Robert Halmis -- Sr. and Jr. -- who have made a career out of adapting the classics, with varying degrees of fealty; their hallmarks are expensive-for-television special effects and modern “psychological” twists not necessarily present in the originals.

Part of the fun of the series is playing Spot the Parallels; the film is studded with references to its sources, some of them no more than puns, or fleeting pictures. (Architecture fans will also enjoy the Gaudi steals.)

Here, the Dorothy figure is called D.G. (Zooey Deschanel), a Midwestern tomboy and waitress (at work she wears a blue gingham apron and ties her hair in pigtails, like the Dorothy of old), who feels out of place at home. Oz has become “the O.Z.,” or Outer Zone -- it’s difficult to hear “O.Z.” and not think “The O.C.,” which suggests a whole other sort of adaptation. The Tin Man (Neal McDonough) is a Clint Eastwoody ex-lawman out for revenge (he’s called a Tin Man for his tin star). And Margaret Hamilton’s green Wicked Witch of the West has been replaced by a hot number named Azkadellia (Kathleen Robertson), who gets lines like, “There’s no place like the O.Z.” and “That little . . . has gone to see the wizard.”

As to that “great and terrible blah blah blah” as Azkadellia calls him, he’s been reduced to a drugged-up nightclub performer, plying the old floating-head-and-fire trick. Richard Dreyfuss is the little man behind the curtain.

To say that “Tin Man” is not as good as its near-perfect models is not to damn it, even faintly. Like Sci Fi’s “Flash Gordon” update -- which the Halmis also produce and which it resembles far more than it does “The Wizard of Oz” -- it’s a good-looking, entertaining fantasy adventure, with a cast that is easy to spend time with. I can see where Deschanel’s sleepy delivery (quite like her sister Emily’s, over on Fox’s “Bones”) might not work on everyone, but I find her excellent company, and Alan Cumming is sweet in the Ray Bolger mode as the Scarecrow-substitute, Glitch.

The four fellow travelers -- also including a Leonine psychic named Raw (Raoul Trujillo) -- are still defined by their apparent lack of a heart, a brain, a home and “the noive,” and when they come at you four abreast, they do somehow thrillingly recall their more illustrious forebears.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Tin Man’

Where: Sci Fi Channel

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

Rating: TV-PG L (may be unsuitable for young children with advisory for coarse language)