Finding all Movieclips on the stage

programming flash
1

I’m trying to understand whats happening here. when i run this code it traces all the movieclips on the stage plus “instance1” which only happens when i also include non movieclip objects on the stage. so is instance1 a automatically created movieclip?


        function addedToStageHandler(e:Event):void{
            
            var stageObject:Object = stage.getChildAt(0); 

            if(stageObject is MovieClip) {
                
                for(var j:int=0; j<stageObject.numChildren; j++) {
                    
                    var tempMc:Object = stageObject.getChildAt(j);
                    trace(tempMc.name);
                    
                    if (tempMc.name == "instance1"){
                    
                        tempMc.alpha = .3;
                        
                    }
                }
            } 
        }

also when i change the:

var tempMc:Object

in the above code to:

var tempMc:MovieClip

i get a Type Coercion error
cannot convert flash.display::Shape@6f386f51 to flash.display.MovieClip.

I don’t understand this because i’m already checking if (stageObject is MovieClip) so it seems like the for loop should be ignoring all non movieclips.

An explanation would be appreciated

thanks!