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Tarzan, the jungle superman created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, has been portrayed on the screen by a succession of no less than 47 monosyllabic musclemen of various nationalities in every decade since the early silent movies.

Amazingly, it's 85 years since the loin-cloth clad, crocodile strangler swung from the first synthetic vines of a Hollywood studio set, be he still shows no signs of fading away. The latest to be cast in the role is Travis Fimmel, 22, a former Melbourne-based model and earlier bare-foot farmboy from the northern Victorian town of Echuca.

Fimmel has been signed by Warner Bros. to star in a new television series due to premiere in the US in October and to be shown in Australia next year. The new Tarzan first attracted worldwide attention last year when his tautly toned torso was controversially displayed on a Central London billboard advertisement Calvin Klein underwear.

The controversy centered on the mind-boggling bulge at the front of Fimmel's briefs, giving a startling extra meaning to the term digitally enhanced.

But the giant billboard in busy Oxford Circus had to be removed following a formal complaint from a British motoring organisation, which claimed that women drivers were slowing down to ogle the young Australian model, causing rear end collisions and traffic jams.

Fimmel has since sportingly acknowledged that the photo was subject to certain technical enlargements and admitted that the billboard caused him acute personal embarassment, though not quite in those words.

"It made me feel like a prick." was his actual eloquent response.

But because of the billboard controversy, Fimmel's name was mentioned in Hollywood when casting had begun to find a new Tarzan for a mammoth budget television series being put together by Warner Bros.

He was one of hundreds of young actors and models tested for the role, and despite his total lack of previous acting experience Warner Bros. president Peter Roth is believed to have personally selected him.

"Travis is a wonderful young man," Roth said. "He has not simply a great look, bu that feeling you get that this person is going to be a big star."

If Roth's prediction proves correct then the athletically built young Victorian could be well on his way to a multimillion-dollar career in not just TV, but the movies. He reportedly is spending all his spare time on acting lessons hoping that his Tarzan role will lead to future offers.

But even if his acting career flounders he's already done pretty well for a young man who was flat broke just four years ago when he was discovered working out in a gymnasium by a talent scout for Chadwick's, the Melbourne modelling agency.

Fimmel had grown tired of milking cows on the family farm in Echuca, where he never bothered to wear shoes, so he'd headed south with a vague idea in his head of somehow breaking into acting.

Instead, his superb physique and country boy facial freshness launched him on a modelling career. However, he always had acting on his mind so, two years later when he'd saved enough money from modelling gigs, he headed for Hollywood.

He attended acting classes but had no acting work offers and when he was down to his $60 he fell back on modelling.

He walked into the offices of LA Models, was snapped up immediately and appeared as the love interest in music video clips for recordings by Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez.

"She's a nice girl, Jennifer, but she's got a big arse," was his honest Aussie comment about the recording superstar.

The later publicity over the Calvin Klein billboard let to his surprise casting for the pilot of the Tarzan series, which deals with Tarzan's adventures in New York, but is being shot right now in Vancouver.

Over the past 85 years since the Tarzan character first appeared in silent movies there have been countless Tarzan movies made, not just in Hollywood but around the world.

However, film historians unanimously agree that the greatest Tarzan of them all was Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic champion swimmer who appeared in the role 12 times from 1932 to 1947.

Weismuller was a larger than life personality on and off the screen and noted just as much for his energetic pursuit of Hollywood starles as his gorilla-like swinging from jungle vines in his movies.

During breaks from filming commitments in the early 1940's he appeared in a water follies stage show with glamorous star Esther Williamn, another former champion swimmer and, in a TV interview on her last Australian visit a few years ago, she claimed the screen Tarzan was constantly trying to seduce her.

"At the end of each performance I'd have to run to my dressing room and lock the door because Johnny was always coming right after me," she said. "And when he couldn't get to me he'd chase all the other girls in the show."

Though Weismuller's studio publicly always claimed that he was American-born, he was actually born in 1904 in Friedhore, now a part of Romania, of German speaking parents.

He moved with his family to Chicago when he was a small child and as a teenager he was an outstanding swimmimg sprinter in the inter-college competition.

He wond three gold medals swimming for the US in the 1924 Olympics in Paris and in 1926 swam the 100m in 59.6 seconds, becoming the first swimmer to break the minute mark for the distance.

At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam he won another two gold medals and was clearly the world's outstanding swimmer of the 1920s.

Weismuller made millions from his long run of Tarzan movies and lived the Hollywood high life to the full, being married and divorced five times.

Travis Fimmel's Victorian bucolic background bares little resemblance to Weismuller's Olympic origins, but at least they started their Tarzan careers with two things in common- both had great physiques and neither had had any acting experience.

Let's face it, "Me Tarzan- you Jane" hardly requires a Shakesperean training, so as long as young Fimmel can yodel and swing from a vine at the same time he'll probably get away with it.