Mike Henry, who had just filmed several big-screen adventures as Tarzan, was intended to have also played the lead in the TV series, but backed out. Ron Ely, who took his place, was originally to have played a Tarzan imposter in a proposed episode of the TV series.
In the course of the first season's shooting, Ron Ely, who insisted on performing his own stunts, sustained seventeen different injuries. These included: singeing his arms and legs running through a burning village, being bitten in the forehead by a "tame" lion (in a later fight with the same lion, Ely was bitten on the lower left thigh), falling down a hill and ripping the skin off the tops of his feet, falling twenty-five feet off a vine and separating his shoulder, falling off another vine and breaking his other shoulder, fracturing three ribs and spraining both wrists.