Short answers, pulled from the story.
The double EP was released in the UK on the 8th of December 1967 on the Parlophone label. Capitol Records issued the eleven-track LP in the US and Canada on the 27th of November 1967, ahead of its planned mid-December release.
The six soundtrack songs were too many for a standard EP but too few for an LP. An EP playing at 33 1/3 rpm was considered but rejected due to unacceptable audio fidelity loss. The double EP format was chosen as a solution and was the first of its kind in Britain.
Lennon was prompted by a fan letter from a student at his former school, Quarry Bank, informing him that an English literature teacher was analysing the Beatles’ lyrics. Lennon set out to write a lyric that would confound such analysis, drawing on Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Joyce.
The Capitol LP reached number 1 on Billboard’s Top LPs listings for eight weeks at the start of 1968. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1969 and had sold 1,936,063 copies in the US by the 31st of December 1967.
The film was broadcast on Boxing Day to an audience estimated at 15 million and was savaged by critics, marking the Beatles’ first major public failure. As a result, the American broadcaster withdrew its bid for North American broadcast rights and the film was not shown in the US at the time.
When EMI standardised the Beatles’ releases for the worldwide CD rollout in 1987, the eleven-track Capitol configuration of Magical Mystery Tour was the only American-reconfigured release retained because its breadth made it comparable in length to the band’s original albums. This meant the additional five singles tracks did not need to be included on the Past Masters compilation.