It would make sense if you were planning to make a film based largely upon junky pop-culture references from the '80s, you would hire the director who himself was the progenitor of an enormous amount of these reference points.
Interestingly, however, as much as Steven Spielberg has seen fit to pillage vast plumes of other artists' work -- everything from Back to the Future and The Iron Giant, to New Order and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (much more on that later) -- he leaves his own body of work from the '80s, an era that includes, among other things E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and its inferior sequels, entirely out of the mix.
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