title: Destroying objects (and their children) removed from the stage
body: <p>I am working in on a Flex / Air application (using PureMVC) written virtually entirely in ActionScript 3 (i.e. we use very little of Flex). View components are added to a Canvas object in the main application window and these Views then load other movie clips, images files, etc.</p>
  
  <p>When I remove a View from the stage, I do so using <code>application.canvas.removeChild(...)</code>. This fires an event in my PureMVC mediator for that View, which removes any event listeners that were set up and everything appears to be dandy.</p>
  
  <p>However, the movie clips are still playing in the background. They are not causing any trouble on screen ... but they are simply there, playing somewhere in memory (e.g. I can see <code>trace</code> statements from them) and I want them gone. I suspect the View that was removed from the Canvas is still there too, but I can't prove it.</p>
  
  <p>Setting the View to <code>null</code> doesn't do anything. I'm surprised that AS3 doesn't include any method to simply and effectively destroy a Display Object and all of its children.</p>
  
  <p>Is the only way to do this to tediously unload all of the movie clips, etc. and then hope that Flash will clean them up?</p>