Actionscript 3 :: Substitute Image In Larger Animation?

We're making a Flash browser game with a few reasonably complex animations. Our designer is making the animations in Flash Professional while I'm wiring everything up and adding some logic through AS3 (using FlashDevelop).In one of our more complex animations a "bonus item" moves around the screen. It tweens hither and tither, there special effects and as such, it disappears for a few frames and then reappears later.From AS3 we want to be able to dynamically decide which bonus item (say a mushroom or a star) to include in the animation. We don't want to have to ask our designer to replicate the entire animation for each of our bonus items.This is what we've tried: Created a two frame (1 mushroom frame, 1 star frame) "BonusItem" movieclip in FlashPro and Exported for ActionScript.Created the complex animation movieclip in FlashPro and added the BonusItem movieclip to the relevant frames. Gave the BonusItem instance an instance name on all necessary KeyFrames. Exported entire movieclip for ActionScript(exported as "ComplexAnimation").[code]This would play the complex animation with the star and we could easily call gotoAndStop("mushroom") to play the same animation with the mushroom.

The first problem was that complexAnimation.bonusItem was null on line 02 above. I solved this by handling ADDED_TO_STAGE for complexAnimation and putting line 02 above in the handler. The next problem was that each time the bonusItem movieclip started tweening, or if it was not present in some frames and was subsequently re-added the complexAnimation.bonusItem attribute/reference was reassigned to a new bonusItem instance. I then had to find a way to know when this was happening and call gotoAndStop("star") on the new instance. I've found two ways to do this:

1) Listen for ADDED events on complexAnimation with a target.name of "bonusItem". It's a bit crap in a strongly typed language to have to resort to matching strings, but this works. Btw, when the ADDED event is fired new frame object references are still null.

2) Listen for FRAME_CREATED events. This happens later than ADDED at a point where new frame references have been initialized. As such I can check if complexAnimation.bonusItem is non-null at then call gotoAndStop("star") on it. One problem with this is that calling gotoAndStop actually triggers another FRAME_CREATED event to fire, so I need to guard against infinite looping. Again, it works but I don't have a great feeling about it.