To celebrate the company's 50th anniversary, 3M, the company that brought you the Post-It note, recently launched an innovative pop-up store in Tokyo. But the while the design is indeed futuristic, it's the sci-fi story behind the company's new mascots that will blow your mind.

3M's new mascots are three, cute as button, ape-human hybrid characters. Essentially taking a page from the Rod Serling epic "Planet of the Apes," 3M offers a back story on their site (in Japanese) that tells of another world beneath ours where monkeys evolved differently into tail-less monkey-men. Then, suddenly, three of these monkey-men fell through some sort of "warp hole," landed in our world, and now work for 3M. And make no mistake, 3M is committed to this sci-fi marketing, deploying a full set of life-sized models of the monkey-men within the store's spacey interior. If you can make it to Tokyo, the exhibit runs until December.

Via Harajuku Shinbun