The MiniDisc sits alongside the Betamax and the Capacitance Electronic Disc in the array of misfit formats that might at some point have dictated our media consumption in alternate timelines but in this particular life just weren't meant to be. When Sony first launched the MiniDisc in 1992, audiophiles the world over could not contain their indifference. Believing in the strength of their product, Sony persisted, and in the latter stages of the decade there was an extensive marketing blitz designed to relaunch the MiniDisc as the must-have music innovation for the up-to-the-minute music lover. The results were mixed - MiniDiscs found popularity in Japan, and to a lesser extent the UK, but never gained much of a foothold in the US. And the window of opportunity for making any kind of long-lasting impression on popular consciousness was just about running out. We were entering the new millennium, and the age of the mp3 player was not far away. In early 2013, the MiniDisc was officially pronounced dead, with Sony announcing that it was pulling the plug once and for all on the format revolution that wasn't. You can read more about the MiniDisc's troubled shelf life here.
The benefits of the MiniDisc, so far as I can tell, were that they were recordable and could fit snugly in your pocket, although I never got close enough to learn any more. I have to confess that it all pretty much passed me by at the time, and I still have no first-hand experience with the format whatsoever. But it made its mark nevertheless. For me, the legacy of the MiniDisc was this strangely nightmarish advert that for a while seemed to show up in every theatrical preview reel I sat through in the late mid-90s (not the ad mentioned in the above Guardian article, in which a gormless-looking disc devotee has strangers go naked in public at the flick of a finger - this one was way cooler). The one-minute ad emphasised the MiniDisc's recording capabilities through the arresting imagery of a man being pursued across the desert by his doppelganger, who mimicked his every last movement. Along route, they encounter a crocodilian (every bone in my body wants to call that creature a crocodile, but I'm not confident enough in my ability to distinguish crocodiles and alligators from the fleeting footage we get, so I'm doing the non-committal thing and calling it a crocodilian), who lunges at the original but ignores his clone - but the clone reacts anyway, as if being willed by a force beyond his control. Spooky.
The croc earns the "horrifying" tag because I used to genuinely dread its appearance as a pre-teen, what with that ominous ocular close-up, the blurred crocodilian perspective shot and that rapid attack on the passing protagonist, but really, the croc's just part of an all-round very freakish and disturbing milieu. I find every last component of this ad to be strangely off-kilter, and they saved by far the most unsettling detail for last. It builds toward an appropriately gut-churning climax, in which the protagonist and his duplicate take a death-defying leap from the top of a bridge down onto a train in motion, and...well, watch the ad for yourself and see what happens. That final reveal...it's just nasty.
I appreciate that the point of this whole uncanny scenario is that the doppelganger is such a "brilliant copy" that he'll replicate the original's actions perfectly, regardless of whether it makes sense for him to do so or not, but still, you would expect there to be a lot more blood at the end in that second carriage. The man did just leap down into a pile of moving rubble, after all. I think the most minor scuff he'd be looking at would be a broken ankle.
For those of you who weren't there at the time, what can never recreated from a mere YouTube upload is the searing intensity you always felt in having this blaring at you from the big screen. The accompanying music track - "Chinese Burn" by English alternative rock duo Curve - is clearly supposed to be the kind of cutting-edge tune you would go for if you were an up-to-the-minute 90s audiophile chic enough for a miniature disc that fits in your pocket, but its throbbing, feverish energy only adds to the overall sense of adrenalin-spiking urgency. There's also the protagonist's rather strange choice of abode - the man is so cutting-edge that he not only uses MiniDiscs, but lives in a swanky space age pod out in the middle of nowhere - which in practice looks downright surreal. Obviously, the intended outcome is that I'm supposed to be impressed by the actor's athletic prowess, an embodiment of the nimble capabilities of the MiniDisc format, and that's all very well-staged, but I'd say the ad plays just as convincingly as a horror piece as it does an ostentatious pose strike. The concept of a person being chased by their doppelganger is inherently unsettling, because it suggests that there's an alternate version of the self vying for sole survival rights; the doppelganger attempting to assume the place of the original is a familiar horror trope. Here, though, it's obvious that the brilliant copy is the one being victimised. The croc might give him a free pass, but he's clearly the protagonist's puppet, an accessory being dragged along on this chase whether he wills it or not, to the point where he's finally forced down onto a pile of speeding rocks and isn't even permitted the freedom to scream out in pain. This is some serious Tethered grotesquery going on right here.
Really though, if you want to get into failed media formats of the waning 20th century, we should go over the Tiger Electronics HitClip some time. I have no idea what life is like the alternate universe where those became a mainstream mainstay, but I'll bet it's very screwy all-around.
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