'Sith' Press Junket

When asked to re-create the voice of Yoda at an Oct. 6 press conference at California's Skywalker Ranch, Frank Oz answered simply, ''No.'' He and fellow SW actors don't want to cheapen the franchise's legacy (though Ian McDiarmid did break down once, allowing a friend to use his Emperor as an outgoing message). ''If you're not careful, you're downloaded to a ringtone,'' says McDiarmid, ''a fate worse than death.'' Elsewhere, Lucasfilm unveiled its latest videogame, Battlefront II (now you can board enemy ships!), and talked about releasing one of the films in 3-D (hopefully by 2007). And Hayden Christensen discussed life after Darth Vader: filming Awake with Sigourney Weaver and letting his epidermis recover from the prosthetics he wore in the volcano scene. ''Even though they can create this realistic makeup, they don't have any advanced solution for taking it off,'' he said. ''There was screaming involved when they literally peeled it off. They removed a layer of skin.''