overloading operators when using setOldClass not works as wanted compared to an S4 class

Can someone explain why overloading an operator on an old-style S3 class which is registered does not work as expected while when defining a new class and overloading the operators does work.

As shown in the following examples.

This does not work.

require(ff) 
setOldClass(Classes=c("ff_vector")) 
setMethod( 
  f="*", 
  signature = signature(e1 = c("ff_vector"), e2 = c("ff_vector")), 
  definition = function (e1, e2){ 
        print("S3 setOldClass")
        e1[] * e2[] 
    } 
) 
ff(1:10) * ff(1:10) 
Error in ff(1:10) * ff(1:10) : non-numeric argument to binary operator

But this works.

setClass("myff_vector", representation(x="ff_vector"))
setMethod( 
  f="*", 
  signature = signature(e1 = c("myff_vector"), e2 = c("myff_vector")), 
  definition = function (e1, e2){ 
        print("S4 setOldClass")
        e1@x[] * e2@x[] 
    } 
) 
new("myff_vector", x = ff(1:10)) * new("myff_vector", x = ff(1:10))
[1] "S4 setOldClass"
[1]   1   4   9  16  25  36  49  64  81 100