I need to delete a variable containing a movie clip class and recreate it with a different movie clip class

Question

Hello,
I am creating a program that is going to help students learn to read. In my project are pages of text with each word having a button that when pressed will display a movieclip presentation about that word (its pronounciation and spelling etc..). In the project I am working on now I have over 450 unique presentations of words to deal with. I don't want to have all of these hundreds of movie clips on the stage and tell them one at a time to stop and rewind and then have one play each time a word button is pressed. That seems to be very inefficient to me. So I want to do this with some code in Actionscript 3.
I know I can dynamically add movieclips to the stage using addChild(movieclipname) and remove them using removeChild(movieclipname) but there is a problem. I have hundreds of unique movieclips and I don't want to have to manage hundreds of variables containing the indivudual movieclip instancess. It is a real pain having to figure out what instance is still on the stage before i delete it.
In Adobe Director all I have to do is this:
on mousedown me
     sprite(me.spritenum).member = member("somenewmember:)
end
and that was it
But if I do this in actionscript 3:
removeChild(some_mc)
some_mc still exists in memory. And I have to know exactly what variable it is to remove or else the movie will fail with an error. If I try to be brutish about it and try to implicitly remove all 450 movieclip instance variables from the stage I will get at least 449 errors.
What I want to do is this:
removeChild(some_mc)
some_mc = void //or //delete some_mc
var some_mc:MovieClip = new someother_mc();
addChild(some_mc)
but this doesn't work
How am I going to remove one of 450 movie clips and add a new totally different movie clip without the code knowing exactly what the last movie clip was? I suppose if could remove a child from the stage based on a string name then I could hold that name in a variable for later disposal.Can I do this?
Thanks for any help you can give me. I am new to actionscript.

Answer 1

Hey I think I may have a solution:
//begin code
var myMC:MovieClip = new ball();
var starMC:MovieClip = new star();
var youpresseeditMC:MovieClip = new youpresseedit();
starMC.name = "star";
myMC.name = "ball";
youpresseeditMC.name = "youpresseedit"
addChild(myMC);
box.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, replaceball);
press_BTN.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, replaceballwithtext);
function replaceball(event:MouseEvent):void {
    trace(myMC.name)
    removeChild(myMC);
    myMC = starMC;
    addChild(myMC);
    trace(myMC.name)
function replaceballwithtext(event:MouseEvent):void {
    trace(myMC.name)
    removeChild(myMC);
    myMC = youpresseeditMC;
    addChild(myMC);
    trace(myMC.name)
///end code
This works. I see the ball object replaced  by the star and I am able to do this by manipulating just myMC. Is there anything I should be concerned with in this approach?
Thanks for your help