ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IS back.

The one-time muscleman who morphed into Hollywood icon and then California governor returns to the screen with a cheekily titled animated TV show, The Governator.

In an interview, the 63-year-old said he wants to surprise fans who expected him to go back to the big screen, moving to a virtual world as a superhero who gets things done without the constraints of laws or political systems.

He describes The Governator as a funny, action-packed, crime-fighting fantasy, which has Action Comics giant Stan Lee at its creative helm.

Schwarzenegger will voice the superhero, a former California governor who assembles a team of whiz kids to fight both crime and natural disasters out of a high-tech lair under his mansion in Brentwood, and unbeknownst to his own family upstairs.

It also has what Schwarzenegger called “speaker spray,” which temporarily allows its recipient to converse in foreign languages.

The simplicity of save-the-day superheroism is a far cry from the messy world of politics. Schwarzenegger commented:

It’s kind of like, when you see that you could have fought certain crimes but the system didn’t allow you, or there were too many people that had to be asked for permission, by that time, the criminals were gone or the disaster that could have been prevented from happening.  With this, it’s a fantasy world where the governor has extra powers.

“When you are a governor, you deal with keeping the beaches clean, making sure there’s enough funding for the after-school programs and the lunch programs for the kids, and all of those kinds of things,” he said at a presentation of the show in Cannes . “As an action hero, you just have to save the world — that’s it.”

The Governator “will be basically fighting the most evil, and worst, of the villains,” Schwarzenegger said.

Schwarzenegger was quick to insist that the show won’t be violent and said that what drew him to the project was a chance to change his image and surprise his fans.

He also suggested that he may be returning to a film career, saying that he had been reading a lot of scripts, but had not committed to anything.

- AP