Flash an object to a solid color?

I *do* wish there were better ways to do this. In Asunder one of the deals is that I not only have enemies flash when you hit them, but go whited-out and leave behind a trail when you rewind them through time. And since it records their animation values, I could easily pull the data for tracing that onto the screen- but the trace objects have to display a hardcoded animation for each object, which limits me. I'm just doing 1-2 whited out animations in one object, for every enemy in the game. If I wanted to capture its full fluid animation properly, it would take a full copy of every animation in the whole game put into a single object, which would not just double the size of the enemies but also take up RAM footprint (enemies are load-on-call).

I'm still researching if there was a better way to do it. Like someone working it into a surface object or something, but I haven't found anything promising.
Screenshot of what i mean by the trails;

http://i.imgur.com/HywOi.png

The problem is, that enemy is a crow that flaps its wings, and has a 4 frame animation. Now for that one, I could go back and hardcode it so it would have 4 different 'trail' animations and use those, but I can't do that for every animation of every enemy in the whole game, and I really wish I could find a better way.

Here's an example using one of Marvs examples..LOL Shoot the chicken and he will flash using an added animation like I had suggested. Please don't use my chicken graphics, Thank you.

One possibility I've thought up is blitting an object to a surface, flood filling it with white, saving that to a file (or memory) and loading it into an animation for the 2nd object, which would cache these images and pull them as needed. But it still seems awfully complicated, slow and with a thousand ways it could go wrong.

AnD4D is right... just duplicate the object and have it mimic the parent. Then make it a "flash" color. It's efficient because it's only on screen during the flash. The other ways described seem needlessly complicated and resource demanding.