The national pastime of eating delicious, reasonably priced snack-food items between meals was made more fun Monday, when the J.M. Smucker Company introduced Smucker's Super-Snackers. The new product, which differs from ordinary Smucker's Snackers due to the inclusion of new 'Magic' Color-Change Sprinkles, is expected to propel already-soaring national snacktime-fun levels to unprecedented heights by mid-spring. Snackel's 'I can't believe how much fun I'm having!' said Boston resident and longtime snack enthusiast Lance Petersen, lovingly sprinkling the exciting granules over his plastic tray-container of jelly and, using the enclosed plastic rectangular spreading tool, smoothing the resultant multicolored substance across a cracker. 'Look at the colors! Thanks to these amazing new sprinkles, the jelly is changing right before my very eyesalmost as if by some sort of magic!' 'Wow!' agreed Salem, OR, snacker Kathleen Naistadt, taking a bite out of a combination cracker/peanut-butter/color-altered-jelly food morsel she assembled all by herself. 'This is fun!' Snacktime, the traditional occasion set aside daily by Americans for recreational, non-hunger-motivated bite-sized food consumption, has always been fun and carefree. But, according to snack-industry insiders, the new Super-Snackers PB&J Deluxe Snak-Paks have taken that fun to a whole new level, providing eaters not only with traditional smell- and taste-based entertainment, but enjoyable visual stimuli, as well. In the process, snack experts say, Smucker's has created a 'total snack experience,' one that all but renders obsolete lesser snacktime diversions previously thought to be 'fun.' 'This new product has set the snacking world on its ear, calling into question our most basic notions of what snacktime is and should be,' said Dr. Hans Volstein, director of Harvard University's prestigious L. Warren Pringle Snacketerium. 'It is not going too far to suggest that snacktime will never be the same.' Snack-industry observers are predicting record sales figures for the snack, which has already made the J.M. Smucker Company the front-runner for the 1999 Snacky Awards. But for all the notoriety, Dr. Walter Tolson, the Smucker's scientist chiefly responsible for the development of the new product, remains humble: The addition of 'Magic' Color-Changing Sprinkles to the already-successful Snackers product line, he said, was 'all in a day's work.' the new Super-Snackers PB&J Deluxe Snak-Pak. 'When we were developing the Super-Snackers, people said to us, 'But you already have Smucker's Snackers, and people love them. Why mess with success?'' said Tolson, speaking from his office at SmuckerLabs. 'But that's just not the way we do things here at Smucker's. Even if we have a popular product, we keep pushing the envelope by adding that extra 'Super-' prefix to it. Its all part of our commitment to providing the American consumer with the most enjoyable snacktime experience science will allow.' 'Taste alone is not enough,' Tolson continued. 'In today's competitive snack marketplace, snackers demand more. They don't merely want to eat. They want to be entertained by what they eat, while they eat it.' Across the nation, snackers are responding to Tolson's bold snacktime vision. 'This fun, interactive, pre-processed food item represents a whole new way of snacking,' said Minneapolis resident Sandra Hirsch. 'If the sprinkles came already mixed in, that'd be boring. But by enclosing the 'Magic' Color-Changing Sprinkles in a separate, sealed plastic packet, Smucker's has given me the opportunity to actively participate in the snacktime processtearing open the sprinkles envelope, peeling back the jelly packet's cover seal, mixing in the sprinkles, and watching the two snack components fuse in a snacktacular explosion of color, a snack experience greater than the sum of its parts.' What's more, Hirsch's children, Ashley, 3, and Brandon, 5, are able to join in the fun. The new sprinkles are so easy to tear open, pour and mix, consumers of all ages can enjoy the new, more fun version of snacktime, even those who possess only the most rudimentary of motor skills. 'Just look at them,' Hirsch said, watching her children rip open their Snak-Paks with glee. 'For them, Smucker's has unlocked the door to a veritable snack-food Valhalla.' Smucker's Super-Snackers are available at retail food outlets nationwide. In addition to the 'Magic' Color-Change Sprinkles, each Super-Snackers contains four crackers, one ounce of peanut butter, a half ounce of strawberry spread, a mini-packet of Brach's Hi-C fruit snacks with real fruit juice, a Kellogg's Rice Krispies Treats square, the aforementioned mini-spreading tool, and a convenient plastic tray for easy, on-the-go snacking, as well as a 'Help Mooch The Puppy Sniff Out The Brach's Hi-C Fruit Snacks And Kellogg's Rice Krispies Treats Square' puzzle maze on the back of the package. Specially marked packages also contain a bonus prize of three temporary tattoos. Though Super-Snackers do contain perishable foodstuffs, manufacturers stress that, thanks to breakthroughs in food-preservative technology, no refrigeration is necessary. 