Movie Clip Array

Hello everybody, I’m a bit stuck but think this should be a fairly easy problem to fix.
I have arranged some movieclip instances on the stage (_root) at author-time and would like to hold them in an array. I can’t seem to get the loop at the end of this script to work: Any help would be hugely appreciated.

Basically what want to end up with is a load in animation, by setting the array’s visibilty to false initially, then looping through a function to set each indexes visibilty to true, with a setInterval variable so that it dosen’t happen too quickly. From there I could add a tween to the loop and fade the array instances in one by one.

shapes = _root[“eye1”,“eye2”,“nose1”,“dots1”,“lips1”];
trace(shapes);

//apply some properties to the array
shapes[_root]._xscale = 50;
shapes[_root]._visible = true;

_root.onEnterFrame = function() {
for (var i:Number =0; i < shapes.length; i++) {
if (shape[_root].hitTest(_xmouse, _ymouse, true)) {
shapes[_root]._alpha = 50;
}
}
};