The 1966 Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track

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This is the fourth article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide our understanding of the environment.

On a smoky afternoon in summer 2025, I stay indoors as air quality advisories caution against outdoor exposure. I watch from my living room window as plumes from the Dryden Creek complex in British Columbia engulf the sky. I settle on an activity to take my mind off the blaze. Against the hum of air purifiers, I snap together 17 curved tracks, 9 straight tracks, and two ¼ track. These form a sprawling figure-eight racecourse with winding outer and inner loops on my living room floor. Called the “Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track, this toy references the ALCAN or Alaska-Canada Highway, a former military road built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in northwestern Canada in 1942. The toy’s manufacturer, New York-based The Ideal Toy Company, designed and marketed this track in 1966 in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the Alaska Highway.1

Top left: The box cover of the Motorific Highway Torture Track with two young boys racing cars. Top right: an open box with component parts featuring grey, orange and yellow pieces. Bottom left and right: gradual assembly of the track on the floor.
I unbox and begin to assemble the Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track on my living room floor. There are grey, orange and yellow pieces neatly arranged in the box by size. (Image by author.)

In summer 2023, I followed the existing 2,232-kilometer route of the Alaska Highway across northern British Columbia and the Yukon.2 My journey coincided with the 2023 Donnie Creek wildfire complex, the largest recorded wildfire to date in the province of British Columbia.3 I drove a circuitous route resembling the winding tracks carefully arranged on my floor. During my journey, I avoided the affected parts of Alaska Highway and dodged impending evacuation operations in the Peace River Regional District and Northern Rockies Municipalities. I documented the highway’s material and environmental conditions and its surrounding areas through sketches, photographs, time lapses, and sound recordings. My exploratory research also involved physically tracing deaccessioned and realigned portions of the original ALCAN road in Canada, which are aptly re-named the “Old Alaska Highway.” 

Images from L-R (top): Track configurations with grey and orange track parts revealing an awkward S-shape instead of a figure 8.
As I continue to assemble the Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track, I realize that I have multiple missing pieces. I struggle with creating a figure eight track that looks like the image on the box or the instructional brochure. I try a few different configurations with the curved tracks before abandoning the toy for a while to pace around my living room and look for missing parts. (Image by author.)

The 1966 ALCAN Highway Torture Track does not capture the complexity of this multijurisdictional route nor my experience driving it. The “Canadian” environment and wilderness, through which a majority of this highway runs, simply vanishes. The toy’s tracks are generic and colour-coded with dust and debris in its grooves, hinting at many years of neglect. Its foldable instructional brochure has a large rip on its front cover, delicate crinkles and creases and large coffee-stain like splotches. It, too, bears no contextual information on the highway. Rather, the set repositions the ALCAN Highway alongside other civilian urban and rural US interstate highways namely the “Motorific Giant Detroit Highway,” and “Motorific Action US 99 Highway.” 

Constructed in 1942-1943, the ALCAN Highway as it was originally named, served a military and strategic defense purpose. Prompted by fears of an Imperial Japanese occupation, the highway’s route was chosen to connect the airfields of the Northwest Staging Route and to offer inland passage from the contiguous U.S. to the then-Territory of Alaska. Its pioneer road was built in just eight months in 1942 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 18th, 35th, 340th and 341st Regiments alongside segregated African American troops in the 93rd, 95th and 97th Regiments, the latter of whose contributions are now publicly commemorated in the State of Alaska.4

In their historical research on the Alaska Highway, Canadian historians Ken Coates and Robert W. Morrison describe the 1942 road building operations as “the U.S. Army of occupation in Canada’s northwest” (1992).5 Similar sentiments are captured by Canadian war artists, A.Y. Jackson and Henry Glyde, who were commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, to visually document the environmental effects on Northern British Columbia and Yukon landscapes through their vivid 1943 sketches and paintings. The black-and-white images produced by Tlingit photographer George Johnson offer a record into the Teslin Tlingit community between 1920-1945, in the years before and after the influx of US troops and road construction in central Yukon. 

Close up of toy box cover featuring two boys playing with a figure-8 track set and multiple cars. The second images features the inside of an empty cardboard box with visible stains and signs of wear and tear.
I try to learn more about the Alcan Highway but there is a lack of contextual information printed in the Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track box set cover or in the interior. (Image by author.)

Read as an object of “everyday militarism,” the Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track perpetuates the fiction of the Alaska Highway as a distinctly American possession.6 This toy track forges a new cultural imaginary of the highway that is divorced from its Indigenous lands, Canadian soil, and Black and First Nations’ wartime labour. Scholar Laleh Khalili, in her study of the US military as a “major geoeconomic actor” in the Arabian Peninsula, argues that the US asserts “its infrastructural power via its US Army Corps of Engineers’ overseas activities” (2018). This claim of US territorial sovereignty in Canada is reproduced in this 1966 children’s toy and along the route of Alaska Highway through its navigational “historic mile markers” that impose a US Customary Unit of measurement, on a distinctly Canadian landscape.7

As I search for a missing track piece, I play a black-and-white 1964 Motorific TV-commercial uploaded to YouTube by creator Osborn Tramain. Their channel is dedicated to “automotive and related TV commercials and film,” including a collection of vintage gasoline commercials revealing the not-so-subtle interplay between automotive and extractive industries.8 As I hit play, the booming voice of Stan Sawyer, a New York radio announcer and voice actor, fills my living room. He opens the minute-long ad declaratively stating “Motorific – it’s terrific!” The camera pans to an action-packed scene with two boys testing their battery-operated slot cars on an elaborately patterned plastic racetrack, that only somewhat resembles mine. A rhythmic chant intensifies “Motorific Torture Track, Motorific Torture Track, Motorific Torture Track…” building tension while reinforcing the toy’s brand identity. Close ups of each child’s face capture heightened states of suspense, excitement, and anticipation. The audience’s gaze shifts to each toy slot-car as it hurtles down the track at top speed–performing complex maneuvers, avoiding hazards, and taking detours along the course. “Eighteen different models to choose from!” broadcasts Sawyer, enticing the commercial’s young audience to add the track and its countless accessories to their wish lists. 

Highly gendered and racialized, this 1960s commercial reinforces white middle class domesticity, masculinist ideals, and capitalist consumer culture through its visual rhetoric.. Architectural historian Dianne Harris writes about these links between consumption, patriotism and middle-class identity. She reads the material culture of the postwar suburban home as “the ultimate symbol of capitalist accumulation,” showing how “consuming became an American pastime, a new mode for recreation, and for some, an antidote to a selection of life’s dilemmas.”9 The Motorific Torture Track similarly targets young consumers with a ‘collect them all’ mentality with the availability of varied add-ons, cars, and track sets.

The 1964 TV-commercial extols the virtues of these “torture tracks” or obstacle courses as objects of play and entertainment for American children and youth. Their marketing and sale coincide with the passage of US laws such the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 or National Interstate and Defense Highways, which expanded the US highway system and in turn, spurred the growth of the automobile industry, increasing car ownership and usage.10 The “torture track,” premised on its speed and functionality, endorses US highway systems that expropriate land, displace communities and perpetuate urban sprawl, while also cultivating young consumers in the US automobile industry. 

In Places Journal, architectural historian Reinhold Martin writes about the promise of the US Interstate Highway System to “[bind] the nation-state together: Interstate.”11 The Motorific Torture Track’s rebranding of the Alcan Highway as an interstate belies the Alaska Highway’s military-to-civilian conversion in 1948 and obscures responsibilities around postwar maintenance and infrastructural obsolescence. These fell disproportionately on the Canadian federal government, in addition to British Columbia and Yukon, based on prior negotiations and agreements of the highway’s perceived postwar benefits of connectivity and improvement in the rural north. Today, Public Services and Procurement Canada, finances major improvement projects on the Alaska Highway including an ongoing multi-million-dollar culvert replacement project, road resurfacing and paving in addition to other climate adaptation initiatives due to the prevalence of floods, rock slides, sinkholes and wildfires along this northern route.12

Components of the Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track are still splayed across my living room. I begin to notice the musty scent of the cardboard box amid the faint smell of wildfire seeping indoors. I still cannot locate a missing track and begin to spot additional imperfections including bent and broken parts that do not affix as advertised. I am frustrated at my purchase. Unlike the commercial or box cover, my set features a single slot car. It is barely operational. The car emits a strange whirring sound and requires multiple nudges to encourage movement, albeit at a snail’s pace along the routed racecourse. I fiddle with its chassis or car frame, blow on its tires, and jiggle the slot pin or blade in hopes of dislodging dust that is settled deep within its groves. But alas!

A classic blue car with a white roof and “Grand Prix” imprinted on its driver side door is pictured in various configurations.
A classic blue car with a white roof and “Grand Prix” imprinted on its driver side door is pictured in various configurations. (Image by author.)

As a recent buyer of this pre-owned racing game, I wonder about the consumer culture of these American collectibles and their wider circulation. Widely available on e-commerce platforms, online classified websites, antique stores, and vintage auction houses that specialize in childhood memorabilia, these secondhand Motorific Torture Track toy sets and individual parts fetch upwards of $100 USD. There is a robust market for these 1960s racing games despite their lack of functionality and poor condition. What historical significance and nostalgic appeal do these toys have? Why are so many sets available for sale today? Who buys them and why? 

After over a year-long search, I purchase a Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track, judiciously selecting a model based on its product description, number of intact parts, and “trusted” seller reputation. The toy ships from its location in the American Midwest to Washington State and eventually makes its way across the land border to British Columbia, Canada. My reasons for purchasing this artifact are varied. As a researcher studying the cultural geographies of this route, the Motorific Alcan Highway Torture Track offers important insight into US consumer culture, childhood play, war memory, and bi-national politics of infrastructural maintenance and repair. 

My engagement with this material artifact, albeit indoors during a wildfire, is not mediated through play alone. As an active participant in the sale and purchase of this American commodity, I become entangled in broader networks and “intimate geographies” of collecting and alternative archiving that cultural geographer Dydia DeLyser terms a practice of “archival autoethnography.”13 Asking deeper questions about this 1966 toy and my encounter with it, from its purchase to my playful interaction, I think about the potential for this reflexive practice to awaken critical sensibilities about “cultures of militarism” that are embedded in everyday material objects, including children’s toys.14

  1. Toy and game manufacturer, The Ideal Toy Company was headquartered in Hollis, Queens from 1908 – 1982 and sold teddy bears, dolls, and the Rubik’s Cube. See more:  Collectors Weekly. https://www.collectorsweekly.com/dolls/ideal and Victoria and Albery Museum https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O84972/teddy-bear-ideal-toy-corp/ (accessed: September 2025) ↩︎
  2. The original length of the pioneer road of the ALCAN Highway was 2,700-kilometers before road realignment operations. ↩︎
  3. Amanda Follett Hosgood. “Fire Weather is Is Hitting the North the Hardest, Study Says.” January 7, 2025. The Tyee. [Available] https://thetyee.ca/News/2025/01/07/Fire-Weather-Hitting-North-Hardest/ (Accessed: September 2025) ↩︎
  4. For scholarship on the wartime labour of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Canada and segregated regiments see: Coates, Kenneth S. and William R. Morrison. 1993. “Soldier-Workers: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Northwest Defense Projects, 1942-1946.” Pacific Historical Review 62 (3): 273-304; Friedman, Andrew. 2017. “US Empire, World War 2 and the Racialising of Labour.” Race & Class 58 (4): 23-38. For commemorative initiatives of Black soldiers see: D’Oro, Rachel. 2017. “Alaska Salutes Black Soldiers’ Work on Highway during WWII.” The Philadelphia Tribune (1884); DeLaine, A. Lois. 2003. “Lifestyle; Black Soldiers’ Contribution to Alaska Highway Forgotten.” Afro-American (Baltimore, Md. : 1915). ↩︎
  5. Khalili, Laleh. 2018. “The Infrastructural Power of the Military: The Geoeconomic Role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Arabian Peninsula.” European Journal of International Relations 24 (4): 911-933; 911. ↩︎
  6. Everyday Militarisms refers to “cultures of militarism” hidden in the everyday and ordinary. See: Kirk, Gabi; Kaplan, Caren; Lea, Tess. Research Forum: Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site. Mar 8, 2020. [Available] 
    https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/everyday-militarisms-hidden-in-plain-sight-site (Accessed: September 2025) ↩︎
  7. Architectural historian Andrew Shanken writes a semantic and architectural history of the “unit” which informs my thinking about the Alaska Highway historical mile markers. See: Shanken, Andrew M. “unit.” Representations (Berkeley, Calif.), vol. 143, no. 1, 2018, pp. 91-117. ↩︎
  8. Thanks to Alina Debyser for initial research on the Motorific series including her sourcing of this 1964 Motorific Commercial – by the Ideal Toy Company. Osborn Tramain. YouTube [Available] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0raeETkyc (Accessed: September: 2025) ↩︎
  9. “Household Goods: Purchasing and Consuming Identity” in Harris, Dianne. Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. University of Minnesota Press 2013, p. 160; 162. ↩︎
  10. Rethinking the Interstates. Places Journal. [Available] https://placesjournal.org/series/rethinking-the-interstates/ (Accessed: September 2025) ↩︎
  11. Reinhold, Martin. “Highways and Horizons: Democracy in America, Again” in Rethinking the Interstate Series. Places Journal. [Available] https://placesjournal.org/article/highways-and-horizons-tesla-and-the-interstates/ (Accessed: September 2025) ↩︎
  12. Government of Canada. Public Services and Procurement. “Protecting our Infrastructure from Climate Change.” August 23, 24. [Available] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/2024/08/government-of-canada-invests-in-culverts-along-alaska-highway.html (Accessed: September 2025). ↩︎
  13. DeLyser, Dydia. 2015. “Collecting, Kitsch and the Intimate Geographies of Social Memory: A Story of Archival Autoethnography.” Transactions – Institute of British Geographers (1965) 40 (2): 209-222. ↩︎
  14. Gusterson, Hugh and Catherine Besteman. 2019. “Cultures of Militarism: An Introduction to Supplement 19.” Current Anthropology 60 (S19): S3-S14. ↩︎

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Desiree Valadares

Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Geography Department and a Faculty Affiliate in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies. She writes about the heritage politics and cultural memory of the Pacific War.

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