Projectile Toast

"Break out the butter... I'm gonna make toast!"

Mario: You know what they say, all toasters toast toast!
(removes plug from socket, causing the entire room full of toasters to erupt in unison)

— Hotel Mario

On TV, toast always jumps up out of the toaster. This serves a variety of purposes, from allowing a character to catch the toast while running by as they're Late for School, to letting the toaster be modified into a weapon.

Very, very rarely Truth in Television.

---

Examples

Advertising

• During ABC's Saturday morning lineup in The '80s, an animated PSA often aired encouraging kids to eat a good breakfast. The toast not only projectile-popped, it did a graceful mid-air leap to land beside the peanut butter.

Anime & Manga

• This clip from the Show Within a Show Helvetica Standard (within the show Nichijou). Poor mouse.
  • Nano finds out the Professor installed a toaster on her when toast pops out of her scalp. She is quite upset about this.

Fan Works

• In Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space a chrome toaster launches two slices of toast at an intruder only to miss completely. Captain Proton comments that Cylon toasters can never shoot straight.

Film — Animated

• The Toaster at the end of The Brave Little Toaster is able to shoot the toast for the Master.

Film — Live Action

• The first Alvin and the Chipmunks live-action movie had a projectile toaster.
• The toaster in Ghostbusters II, which launched toast into the air while dancing to Jackie Wilson.
  • Justifiable considering the toaster was operating under the influence of positively-charged "mood slime".
• Inverted in the short film parody Night Of The Living Bread, where toasters are used to destroy the rampaging zombie bread slices.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it's not toast but a plunger that gets lodged in the toaster during the opening cartoon.

Literature

• In the Animorphs book The Test, Marco says he put a pop tart in the toaster, but it flew out and hit him in the face.
• In the Red Dwarf book Better Than Life Talkie Toaster kills a mutant like this, by launching red-hot ashtrays at it.
• In the Sonic the Hedgehog in Robotnik's Laboratory, Sonic himself gets turned into a toaster. You heard me. Then Tails and a monkey friend turn Sonic the Toaster into the world's first Waffle Gun. Tails goes totally Action Hero on a rampage into Robotnik's laboratory, at one point disintegrating a heavy door with waffles.

Live Action TV

• Toyed with in a variation in one episode of Angel. A bizarre device that Fred has been tinkering with is theorized by several other characters to be some kind of projectile launcher (it actually does throw axes) or maybe it just makes toast.
• The Avengers (1960s) episode "Return Of The Cybernauts" concluded with a tag where Steed's attempt at repairing Emma's toaster succeeds all too well.
• Dans Une Galaxie Près De Chez Vous Due to Pétrolia upgrading the ship's toaster with turbine compressor springs, two toasts got launched at supersonic speeds. Bob ends up having one of the toasts embedded into his skull, missing his brain(Bob's brain is both small and able to hide itself). The other bounced all over the place, without losing momentum.
• A physical challenge from Double Dare involves launching toast out of a springloaded toaster across the stage to one's partner.
• Family Ties. "If that had been a Pop-Tart, we'd both be dead now."
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had one scene where Phil's inability to fix appliances is brought up, including a line of something like "Just like dad 'fixed' the toaster?" just on cue for toast to launch from the offscreen kitchen into the living room where the conversation is being held. Ashley then says to "set the toaster on dark so she can meet it at school."
• The Goodies
  • Tim is pelted by toast fired from the toaster when the household appliances rebel in "Robot".
  • In "Bunfight at the O.K. Tea Rooms", Graeme is playing poker with slices of toast instead of cards, and cheats by having a toaster hidden under the table to throw fresh toast into his hand when he needs a new 'card'.
• I Love Lucy is perhaps the oldest TV show this is seen on, and it became somewhat of a Running Gag. On one memorable occasion, Lucy was angry that Ricky was paying more attention to his newspaper than to her, so she loaded up the toaster, and aimed it at him. Ricky caught the toast out of the air without even looking up from the paper. For bonus points, the show was always filmed in one take, requiring Desi to catch it on the first try.
  • A later episode made a Call-Back to this. Ricky and Lucy decide to prove who has it harder by swapping roles, with Lucy getting a job and Ricky becoming a homemaker. This time Lucy sits behind the newspaper, Ricky launches the toast, and Lucy catches it effortlessly.
• Lucille Ball apparently loved this trope. It also shows up on The Lucy Show, when Lucy gets a job at Mr. Mooney's bank, selling new savings accounts and giving away free toasters. To give her demonstration "pizzazz," she puts a passbook into the toaster and then launches it out in order to give it to the customer.
• A Projectile Toaster was worked into Morecambe and Wise's classic making-breakfast-to-the-tune-of-'The Stripper' routine.
• True to the spirit of the trope if not the letter, the MythBusters once built three different devices that threw toast on the floor to test the "always-butter-side-down" myth.
• Our Miss Brooks: Mrs. Davis' toaster worked this way.
• On Pixelface, Romford's attempt to 'upgrade' the kettle somehow results in the toaster launching Projectile Toast at Alexia.
• This is how the Teletubbies get their Tubby Toast.

Newspaper Comics

• Occurs in one Calvin and Hobbes strip when the duo are marveling over the miracle that bread left in the toaster becomes toast.
• In one Curtis strip, Curtis is tired of the worn-out toaster malfunctioning, so he tinkers around with it. He tests the result, and winds up launching the toast through the ceiling and into the apartment upstairs.
• There is a Garfield comic where Odie is launching slices of toast into the air, while Garfield is shooting them out of the air with a bow and toilet plungers. Jon is obviously not happy about this, after he gets hit in the face with one.
  • This is also played with in other Garfield strips - Jon attempts to fix the toaster and instead ends up making it launch toast at such speeds that it ricochets across the house, knocking Odie into walls, among other things.
  • Another comic where Garfield expects the toaster to launch its contents: he uses a roller brush to paint the ceiling with jam, then uses a plunger to pull the slices down after they hit and stick.
  • Literally inverted in one strip, where Jon turns the toaster upside-down to keep Garfield from stealing his toast (by jumping over the toaster as the toast pops up). The toaster then launches upward, and Garfield goes face-first into it.

Pinball

• In Junk Yard, collecting the Toaster and the Hair Dryer nets the player character the Toaster Gun, which he can then use to shoot Spike, the Angry Guard Dog. This is required as Spike carries a crucial part needed to escape the junkyard, though the part is chosen at random.^note Technically, it's not random—the parts cycle through the list of remaining ones with each press of the flipper button, but due to the nature of pinball, it might as well be random.

Video Games

• In 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue, One of Cruella De Vil's mechanized toys is a robot that disguises itself as a regular, working toaster when idle, then transforms into robot form with the toaster as its chest when you're in range. The robot then proceeds to shoot its toast at you.
• Crazy Machines is a physics simulation where you can engineer your own Heath Robinson Machine. Including an electric toaster and this trope.
• The Glider games include toasters which juggle slices of deadly toast. Aluminum foil allows you to survive getting hit by toast with considerable Knockback, which some house authors exploited.
• In The Incredible Machine, the toaster essentially acts as a one-shot, electric-powered springboard; when the bread shoots out, anything resting on the toaster is pushed up. Even bowling balls spring up a few inches.
• The Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot familiar in The Kingdom of Loathing occasionally stuns enemies by shooting toast from its groin-mounted toaster. Toast produced this way goes into your inventory as an edible food item. Don't think about the implications too much.
• In MDK2, Doctor Hawkins's primary weapon is an atomic toaster that fires irradiated slices of toast...and baguette rockets, and pumpernickel grenades...
• Cyan's early children's game Spelunx has a minigame where you must bounce slices of bread up to a man who drops them, using a toaster. There's even a backstory for the minigame in one of the journals.
• The first boss of Splatoon 2 is the Octo Oven (425° of Pain), which attacks with glazing ink, ink pistons, and octopus bread. Notable in that instead of shooting slices at you, it ejects whole loaves from its many ovens. The loaves work as platforms, too!
• Played with in SPY Fox 3: Operation Ozone; one of the SPY gadgets is the Spy Toaster, which SPY Fox can use to launch himself up to 20 feet in the air by sticking his feet in the slots and pushing the lever down. As one of the ingredients SPY Fox will need to collect for Professor Pushpin's Congeal Pill is a piece of chicle from the Temple of Chicle-Pichu, he will need the Spy Toaster to launch himself up to the pulley holding down the gate to the chicle vault. SPY Fox lampshades the use of this trope by saying that if the Spy Toaster were an ordinary toaster, he would never stick anything other than a piece of bread into it.
• Tonic Trouble featured a mad scientist's "Laboratory" that had one section where you ride a floating platform over vast pools of lava while insane robot toasters fired flaming hot slices of toast at the player.
• Catching the toast that pops out of a toaster composes one of the many, many microgames in the WarioWare series.

Webcomics

• In The Book of Biff, Biff learns to be more patient when preparing toast.
• In Schlock Mercenary, Munitions Commander Kevyn Andreyasn used a simple toaster as a trial-run for a damaged 'fabber' plant, and ended up with a cross between a toaster and a Bouncing Betty. Schlock, being Schlock, begged it off him so he could take it down to the firing range.
  Schlock: "See? You get a lot more stopping power out of whole wheat."
  Grunt: "It's my turn now."
• Riff invents a souped up one of these in this Sluggy Freelance strip.

Western Animation

• Snoopy proves himself Virtuoso Master of the Projectile Toast during the cooking scene from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.
• The Kids Next Door have, among their improvised weapons arsenal, numbers of Gatling gun-like weapons that end in toasters. They seem to launch energy, though.
• Darkwing Duck deliberately rigged his toaster for this purpose, as part of his breakfast/training routine. His entire breakfast is launched at him this way, in fact. Including... the milk.
• On Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter once slowed time to one-sixtieth its usual rate. As a result, the toast was suspended high out of his reach in midair.
• Dogstar: In "Father's Day", Ramon Ridley builds a radio telescope out of an old satellite and a toaster. He comments that it still makes an excellent toasted muffin and to prove it, fires a muffin that hits Glenn in the face.
• In the DuckTales (1987) episode "Sir Gyro de Gearloose" Gyro tries to fix a toaster that's so off-whack it's shooting the toast through the ceiling. He goofs it up and ends up causing the toaster to break through the table and hit the floor.
• Get Ed: The main villain has a bumbling minion named Crouch, who is a robot with a toaster for a head. Every time Crouch gets scared, the toast goes flying out.
• Launching toast at Invader Zim's face is one of the least annoying things GIR does upon getting his mind sucked into their house's master control system.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes, where toast was apparently a lifeguard in the Beach Episode.
• In one episode of Johnny Test, Johnny accidentally brings Smash Badger (an Affectionate Parody of Crash Bandicoot) into the real world. While tearing up Johnny's house (literally and metaphorically), he picks up a toaster and shoots toast at the kids and Dukey, which is heralded by Johnny shouting "Flaming toast!".
• Several Looney Tunes shorts feature a "get a character out of bed and ready for the day" Rube Goldberg Machine that includes a toaster shooting toast straight into the character's mouth. At least one Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog uses it as an Establishing Character Moment for Ralph (who is Brilliant, but Lazy).
  • The Bugs Bunny cartoon "To Hare Is Human" shows Bugs with a toaster that loads carrots. Wile E. Coyote substitutes the carrots with hand grenades, but guess what happens when the toaster goes off.
    Bugs: One 'o dese days I'm gonna have to get that toaster fixed.
• In the Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) cartoon, one of Roll's attachments for her Utility Arm was this. She used it to defeat Cutman.
• Twist: In The Ren & Stimpy Show Powdered Toast Man actually shot butter packets instead. (After all, he was meant to promote powdered toast.) He also launches himself to his destination by jamming his head into a toaster and making himself the projectile.
• Teen Titans Go!: When Cyborg is uploaded into the Titans Tower computer in "Tower Power", he sends various appliances to attack the other Titans. Starfire is bombarded by a barrage of projectile toast from the toaster.
• Tex Avery gives it a twist on "The House of Tomorrow". Instead of the toast, ''you'' pop up!
• In The Venture Brothers, Chuck, a "member" of the Revenge Society is just a plain toaster that shoots toast. Revenge (Phantom Limb) uses Chuck's expertise to disarm traps (... it shoots toast that sets off the traps).
• Wallace & Gromit seem to have specifically modified their toaster to launch the toast with incredible precision; the toast flies across the table, only to be "shot down" by a glob of jelly, landing neatly on Wallace's plate. One suspects that a considerable amount of trial and error went into setting this up.

Other

• The After Dark screensaver had the famous Flying Toasters, which juggled slices of toast and occasionally passed them to each other.

---