zombie84 said:

He tries to pass it off to Lucas now, but I don't buy that for a second, Spielberg knew exactly what he was doing and he took that dark, spooky, gorey aspect of the film and ran with it. Maybe Lucas pushed it that direction in the first place, but Spielberg perfected it. He was into that kind of thing at the time--he had just finished Poltergeist, remember.

On the Indy DVDs (the 4th "Making of Disc" or the 2nd ToD Disc) there's a part where Spielbergo talks about how uncomfortable he was with the "dark" direction that Lucas (and the Hyucks) took it and that he more or less let Lucas play the "trust me [Indy grin][/Indy grin]" card on him. But then while they were filming it, he decided to "counter" or "offset" the darkness with slapstick action. They specifically show the scene where the big thuggee swings his hammer, loses it, and it plunks straight down onto a skinny guy over in the corner.

Hillarious.

My problem with ToD isn't so much that it's dark, but that it is goofy like that. So, if it is Steven's wish, I will lay the good parts of ToD at Lucas' (original Lucas) and the bad parts at his. That kind of humour seemed to sneak into Lucas' repertoire though, and we've had "cartoon rabbit steps in the poopy" jokes ever since.

EDIT: Looks like I'm repeating myself: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/New-Theory-Steven-Spielberg-Ruined-Star-Wars/topic/12412/