Cheeta is a male chimpanzee noted for appearing in numerous movies and television shows, most famously many Hollywood Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s, in which he portrayed a fictional chimp of the same name. While inextricably associated in the public mind with Tarzan, Cheeta as a character was a product of the movies, never appearing in any of the original Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.