The Star Syndicate

The Star Syndicate are a newgrounds group much like the Clock Crew, it is debated whether they can be considered “spinoffs” of the Clocks due to the way they do not follow the usual conventions of the CC copycats. They specialise in deliberately poor quality flashes (often in the form of collaborations) and irritating Newgrounds users and Newgrounds in general.

Sixstar and Sevenstar were experimenting with a 3rd party flash-making program, when they came up with the idea that a flash group might earn them the support necessary to make it through judgment on Newgrounds. So Sixstar came up with the Star Syndicate, based on Sevenstar’s username (which, at the time, was Sevenstar). They soon tried to obtain a copy of flash. They gave their friend the position of Fivestar, and some guy they met online be Fourstar, who they are to this day. However, the other three stars (Threestar, Twostar, and Onestar) changed several times.

The original Threestar is known now as Kopilut. He was a personal friend of Six and Seven, but they sort of screwed him over. What ended up happening was that he bought Flash for them, only to find out that Six and Seven obtained a copy from a friend. Then they gave his position of Threestar to a girl who was then known as InvaderHanzi, and that is who is Threestar currently.

The next position to be assigned was Twostar. The first twostar assignment, however, was sort of a ruse. At the time, the Star Syndicate was in a small internet war with a kid named Gianfranco, who let a group called Underglove. Ivan (know known as jetninjin, or jn-) was suspected of being a member of UnderGlove. So they made him Twostar and fed him fake info in hopes that Gianfranco would take the bait. However, he wasn’t a traitor, and was actually a loyal member of the SS. They found this out, apologized, and removed him from his position of Twostar. They soon replaced him with Ackmm7 (no longer a member of the SS). Soon, Ackmm7 became inactive, and was removed from his position of Twostar. Then the position was finally granted to CommunistLock (who still hold the position today).

The position of Onestar had only two holders. The first was once again jetninjin. He was given the spot because we was a loyal member of the group. A few months later, he gave up the position, because he felt he wanted to focus more on making movies than on forum status. The position was given to Darkshot (d4rksh07) who still holds it today. Zerostar came about as a way to annoy Sixstar, who stated that there should only be seven stars because it was a reference to Super Mario RPG. Zerostar, who was at the time Nohimn, eventually was allowed to take the name on the SS forums. He gradually began to be more known as Zerostar than his former name, so his Newgrounds account soon changed accordingly. This also resulted in the name Eightstar being taken (CodeRedClock).

Dailytoons came about as inspiration from a few things one was that Livecorpse used to release two movies a day. Another was that Piconjo Jams were low quality and were able to pass because they were collabs which I thought was brilliant. Another was that hatter enjoyed bad reviews because the authors comments gave him the last word and, of course, because people kept saying that the Star Syndicate “flooded the portal” so I decided, why not actually flood the portal? And, of course, we get hilarious reviews to laugh at so the next day, we got dailytoons.

The first one was an idea we hatched up around January, when we realized we weren’t far away from reaching 100 movies so we decided a few weeks in advanced that we would declare the 100th dailytoon release to mark daily day. However, there were a few problems. Dailytoons weren’t managed too well, so the number of dailytoon episodes, and the number of submissions didn’t match. So j00bie renamed a few submissions on the dailytoon account, essentially making them no longer dailytoons. Which is what he did with the TMNT collection. When daily day finally came along, it was so disorganized that I figured we would be lucky if we got 8 movies. The total was something around 35.

Dailytoon 100 was a remake of my 2nd and 3rd dailytoon submission, which I actually finished off at hatter’s house (madhatt3r, hatterclock, currently nazibomb) and that’s it for the first daily day.

The second season of dailytoons came about when I came back from an extended vacation from the Star Syndicate. j00bie was my partner in running the dailytoon series, and he did the majority of the work in the first season, so I really wanted to bring him into deciding whether or not we should go through with the second season. We were actually planning the second season almost two months before, but my account was deleted, I handed the series to j00bie, and he declared it dead. I asked him if he wanted to get it started again, and he said sure, but when? and I said, let’s just do it tomorrow. So once again, a series of dailytoons started entirely on impulse.

During the second season, we were far much more organized, and our submission count actually matched our episode count. We also made it through the whole 100 without missing any days. However, that season met some censorship from the Newgrounds administration, and two episodes had to be resubmitted but editted. One of the movies has the faces of Newgrounds members covered up with the Newgrounds logo, and the other had a movie removed altogether

I decided to plan the second daily day ahead of time, and I began Dailytoon 200 two months beforehand. However, things like school and my summer job really got in the way of making the movie. I ended up making it a collaboration piece, which was one of my better ideas. The structure of a movie preview was essentially broken down and made into an unscripted collaboration between myself and several artists. Powerranger_YELLOW, who collaborated a lot of daily2oons with j00bie and I, did watercolor background art for my portion of the movie. Astropuff cleaned up some of the animation (it’s incredible what a small tween could do to your movie), and FDA (Shok) made the music. The Second Daily Day was such a success, we won 4/5 of the daily awards on that day. Our portal day boasted over 80 movies, making it the biggest non-annual portal day in Newgrounds history.

It is not uncommon for Clock Crew members to own an account on the Star Syndicate website, because of it’s status as ‘another Newgrounds group’ and not just a spinoff, people are not flamed for owning one. Many Star Syndicate members hold the Clock Crew in low esteem, considering them to be past their glory and full of noobs. The eccentric ex-clock GrandfatherClock is an admin on the SS forums.

• Star Syndicate Forums
• Star Syndicate NG collection page