Jonathan Storm | You're not in 1939 anymore

Welcome to The O.Z.

You wonder how many high-fives went around the room when the writers of the Sci Fi Channel's "update" on

The Wizard of Oz

came up with a new name for over-the-rainbow land that plugged squarely into kid culture.

The O.C.,

lighthearted soap among the SoCal rich and beautiful, started fizzling on Fox three years ago, but still. At least we won't get

Tin Man

(9 tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday) confused with HBO's

Oz.

The Sci Fi show may be too scary for the little ones, but it's not a depraved mess.

In fact, it's a cornucopia of fanciful sets and costumes and more computer graphic imaging than you'll find anywhere else on TV, and a lot of it is pretty cool. No surprise, since it comes from myth-mad mini-series maestro Robert Halmi, who's still cranking 'em out at 83.

In the new one, the evil sorceress dispatches men to Kansas to knock off a gal named D.G., who has no ruby slippers and doesn't look all that much like Auntie Em's Dorothy Gale.

The assassins fail, and D.G. winds up "on the other side," in The Outer Zone, on the drab brick road, accompanied by a guy with a zipper in his head but not much brains, a scaredy-cat Chewbacca cousin, and a hard-guy cop who's short on heart.

Toto turns up later.

Oz

fiends,

Wizard

variety, will recognize mutant versions of the familiar fable - Munchkins, deadly poppy fields, and so on. The most disappointing holdover is the wizard himself.

Richard Dreyfuss is but a midstream cameo as The Mystic Man. He's got a heck of a cabaret act, including "vapors" all around. Chemically unenhanced home viewers will think it looks swell, too, but there's no man-behind-the-curtain morality here.

There is lots of new stuff, however: an itinerant sleazoid who provides "entertainment" in the back of his overdone wagon; an entire country of misfits, "The Realm of the Unwanted," obviously inspired by the little-watched CW network, with perpetual wrestling matches in a ring on Main Street.

Our heroes pass through the robot-inhabited Milltown, where the leader spins above the ground in some Gyro Gearloose contraption that opens to produce a home-movie projector to illustrate his discourse.

There's no shortage of imagination, as The O.Z. is portrayed as an ultra-futuristic corner of the universe, seen from a 1900 point of view.

Always fun, Alan Cumming

(X-Men 2, Reefer Madness)

plays the man with half a brain, and Neal McDonough

(Flags of Our Fathers, Boomtown)

is a terrific tough guy, but the show rises and falls with D.G.

Zooey Deschanel

(The Assassination of Jesse James, The Good Girl)

is just about perfect, bouncing from adventure to adventure, all plucky and feisty and game, with the biggest and palest blue eyes you have ever seen. She's on a quest to prevent the ultimate O.Z. catastrophe.

Halmi, who grew up in Hungary, phrased it thus to the Associated Press: "I couldn't find anybody else who's so innocent, with eyes so wide open."

Deschanel says Judy Garland is one of her favorite musical performers, but anyone listening for tunes in

Tin Man

will be disappointed. It's no musical.

The sorceress (Kathleen Robertson from

Hollywoodland

and

Scary Movie 2)

is quite a contrast, cold as ice, but done up in sexy duds that accentuate her wasp waist and include metal shoulder guards but a low-cut bodice. Wait till you see the special power of her heaving bosom.

How she came to power (and D.G. came to Kansas) is a complicated story of magic and fear and the importance of family that unfolds in the course of the six-hour series, which, like most of these things, is about an hour too long.

Still, there's action right around the corner when things start to drag. And the gargantuan finale, with every O.Z. turbine straining to power the mythical sunseeder, which shoots an earth-shattering beam through the sorceress into the sky, forever casting The Outer Zone into darkness by eclipsing its two suns, is worth waiting for.

You won't see that on

Grey's Anatomy.

Television

Tin Man

9 tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday on the Sci Fi Channel.