Model Irish McCalla portrayed the titular character in "Sheena: Queen of the Jungle", a 26-episode TV series, aired in first-run syndication from 1955 to 1956. McCalla told a newspaper interviewer she was discovered by Nassour Studios while throwing a bamboo spear on a Malibu, California beach, famously adding "I couldn't act, but I could swing through the trees." Although the Sheena character was often called "the Queen of the Congo," the TV series clearly located her in Kenya, which is hundreds of miles from the Congo River. Though the character was created in comic books by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger many years earlier, a 1956 "New York Times" obituary for Claude E. Lapham, a 10-year editor at Fiction House, says, "His story 'Sheena' was the basis for the television story of that name."