Nostalgic Humor and Cultural Memory in the Remakes of Hong Kong Jane Bond Films‌‌‌

The production of Hong Kong James Bond spoofs or Bondpian is often attributed to the Bond craze that started after the screening of Dr. No (Young 1962) in Hong Kong on May 9, 1963 (Lee 2017, 350). According to the film critic Sam Ho, "In the 1960s, after the box office success of the Hollywood James Bond films Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (Young 1963) and Goldfinger (Hamilton 1964), spy films became a global phenomenon. Imitations sprang up all over the so-called free world, the parts of the world huddled under the anti-communist banner (2009, 221; Ho's original)."  Critics have examined cosmopolitanism (Tan 2015, 195), representations of women killers (Desser 2017, 117-23), gender performativity and gender traits (Yau 1997), and categorization of these 1960s Hong Kong Bondpin or "Bond films" as crime thrillers (Van den Troost 2014, 64-66) and as "spy films without spies" (Ho 2009, 223; Ho's original).
This chapter focuses on the cultural legacy of James Bond spoofs in their comedy remakes in the 1990s. Juxtaposing two trilogies featuring the archetypal Cantonese Jane Bond character, Black Rose in Chor Yuen's Black Rose Trilogy (1965-1967) and Jeff Lau's La Rose Noire Trilogy (1992- 1997), it argues that nostalgia and humor are key to understanding the cultural memory of Hongkongers in popular culture. This is especially true as the British colonial
rule was approaching its end on July 1, 1997.