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Celebrate National Toast Day with these outlandish toasters (pictures)

Don't settle for a normal toaster when you can have a knife that cooks while it cuts or a kitchen appliance that burns Star Wars onto your bread.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
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1 of 10 Jarno Kotavuopio

Nintoaster stuffs a Nintendo in a toaster

It's National Toast Day in the UK, but the celebration is worldwide as #NationalToastDay trends on Twitter. Up your bread-browning game with these delightfully wacky toasters with themes ranging from high-concept to Star Wars sci-fi.

The Nintoaster 2.0 is a retro toaster with its guts pulled out and replaced with a working 8-bit NES console. Why does such a thing exist? Because Finnish artist Jarno Kotavuopio wanted it to. The silver-and-orange creation is a work of gaming art.

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2 of 10 License 2 Play

Toast on the Dark Side

Insert Dark Side joke here. This Darth Vader helmet-shaped toaster from License 2 Play is the stuff Star Wars breakfast dreams are made of.

This image shows an early form of Darth Vader toaster. A final production model from Pangea Brands features a chopped-off head and the Star Wars logo emblazoned on the bread. We can still be nostalgic for this earlier version with its cool Vader-face toasting pattern.

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3 of 10 Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET

Famous flying toasters

You know you were a computer user in the '90s if you remember the After Dark flying-toasters screensaver for Mac and Windows. The surreal animation featured winged toasters and well-browned pieces of toast zipping gracefully across a black background. Ah, those were the good old days of computing.

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4 of 10 Pangea Brands

Spider-Man on your toast

There's a wonderful quote in the Raymond Chandler mystery "Farewell, My Lovely": "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." That line will ring in your mind every time bread pops out of a Spider-Man toaster with Spidey's arachnid logo burned into each slice. This may be the only time you'll ever be happy to eat a spider.

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5 of 10 Gavio

Hot buttered iPhone

Let's go back in time to 2012, back to when the latest iPhones were numbered with "4" and "5." That's when Gavio announced its toaster-shaped iPhone speaker dock, a delightful retro romp made to hold your smartphone and play your tunes out loud.

Looking back through gadget history, it's hard to tell if the dock ever made it into production. But that doesn't matter now. It wouldn't work with your iPhone 6S Plus.

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6 of 10 Nostalgia Electrics

Taco toaster? Sign me up!

Excuse me? Can you repeat that? You said "taco toaster?" Yes. My life is now complete. There is such a thing as a taco toaster and it comes from Nostalgia Electrics. It bakes both corn and flour tortillas into the classic folded hard taco shape. If you need to justify owning this single-purpose kitchen appliance, all you need to do is whisper softly to yourself: "taco toaster."

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7 of 10 Video screenshot by Michael Franco/CNET

It's a knife and a toaster

Crazy inventor Colin Furze really heated things up when he made a blazing hot knife that toasts bread as it's slicing the loaf. The don't-try-this-at-home experiment really worked, turning out delicious-looking slabs of toasted bread.

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8 of 10 Inventables

Clearly a concept toaster

Toasting is usually a guessing game. You send your bread down into the dark abyss and then wait, hoping it will pop back up in the perfect state of brownness. This see-through concept toaster from 2009 imagines what it would be like if transparent glass could also brown your bread. It's not a real appliance, but at least we got a toaster with a window in 2013 and Bugatti recently got busy making the idea a reality.

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9 of 10 Bugatti

Bugatti gets toasty

You might be familiar with Bugatti as a manufacturer of really fast, really expensive cars. The company also made a foray into high-tech toasters in 2014. The Noun uses ceramic glass sides to conduct heat. It's not just for bread, but can handle sliced vegetables and meat. Conveivably, you could toast your bun and all your sandwich innards using one futuristic-looking device.

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10 of 10 Inseq Design

Dot matrix toaster

Remember dot matrix printers? They were the typewriters of the computer printer world. The Zuse toaster popped up in 2008 and took its toasting inspiration from dot matrix printers. It was capable of printing toasted images based on designs stored in a memory chip.

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