I need to send three simple variable values from a mother movie to subsequent
externally-loaded .swf files. I've been using loadMovieNum() to load the
external .swf files to both replace the mother movie and also to sit on top of
it and can't get the variable values to pass from one to the other. I don't
need to load them from an external file, or do anything fancy. I just need the
loaded movie to grab values from the mother movie that spawned it.

Thanks in advance.

I had a similar problem since I started learning AS.

use _global.variableName = "whatever";

let's say you need to pass the variable "tom" from movie to movie

try this...

_global.myName = "tom"

in another movie use

theText_txt.text = myName;

it would set the dynamic text with instance name "theText" equal to your
global variable in this case "tom".

I'd start here.
try searching for passing variables or global variables and see what comes up
in the forums previous posts.

hope this helps.

sky