The sound is a bit crap, but you probably remember all the dialogue anyway. "Where I come from Tenzing, there's no such word as asumpowtcha!"

Any Nepali speakers able to verify that?

When my dad was a kid in Malaysia, his Indian schoolteachers always made the usual unsubtle postcolonising inferences that Tenzing had made it to the top before Hillary, or that he had to step aside at the last few feet for the white man, but that revealing the truth would of course would have led to the fall of the British Empire.

It fell anyway.

True or not, this ad, although uncompromisingly adorable, grated a little on my SEAsian postcolonial dad, in its portrayal of Sherpa Tenzing as being terrified of the journey and wanting to turn back.

Our heart may be with Hillary in this canonical narrative, but some of us are always going to be wishing better times for that generically brown kid symbolising the sidekick tag-along of the postcolonial partnership.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more stirring and representative slice of this classic form of New Zealand nationalism though. My brother still eats Weetbix daily; it's always kind of made me gag a little.