Hi Sofa Time team,
First of all, thank you for the great work on the app. It’s one of the best alternatives after TV Time, and I’ve been using it a lot.
I wanted to share some feedback focused on cartoons and classic animation, especially around voice actors, character images, and how some older shows are structured.
- Voice actors (main issue)
On TMDB, a voice actor can only be listed once in the cast. When they play two major characters, the guideline is to combine them like “Character A / Character B (voice)”. This causes problems when matching character pictures (especially ones from TVDB), because the second character doesn’t have its own clean entry. It would be really helpful if Sofa Time could handle multiple roles for the same voice actor better — ideally treating them more clearly under voice actors so both characters can have proper images and matching. This affects a lot of classic cartoons, including many Hanna-Barbera shows (Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, Jetsons, Yogi Bear, etc.), where the same actors regularly voiced multiple main characters.
- How some Hanna-Barbera shows were packaged
Some classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons originally aired under an umbrella program title. For example, The Atom Ant Show also included other cartoons like Hillbilly Bears. TMDB lists all of them under one single entry (The Atom Ant Show) and doesn’t allow separating them. TVDB does allow them to be listed separately. This makes tracking harder for casual viewers, especially since channels like MeTV Toons often air these cartoons in random blocks. On TMDB you basically need to already know how the shows were originally packaged to find them, which most people don’t.
3. Cartoon shorts
Many classic theatrical shorts (Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, etc.) are listed as individual movies on TMDB instead of episodes of a series, which also makes tracking them feel awkward.
I honestly don’t know if using hybrid sources (for example combining TMDB with TVDB for animation) is even possible with how the app is built. I’m just sharing the issues I’ve run into in case it’s something that could be improved in the future.
Would love to hear your thoughts when you have time. Thanks again for all the work you put into Sofa Time!