After taping the basic track and vocals in late May 1966, they held a session to overdub nautical sound effects, party ambience and chorus singing, recalling producer George Martin's previous work with members of the Goons.

In the US, the release of "Yellow Submarine" coincided with the controversies surrounding Lennon's "More popular than Jesus" remarks – which led some radio stations to impose a ban on the Beatles' music – and the band's public opposition to the Vietnam War.

"[12] Previewing the 2022 re-release of the Beatles' Revolver album, however, Rob Sheffield describes Lennon's home demo of the song as "a melancholy acoustic ballad, evoking Plastic Ono Band".

He says this solo recording debunks the widely accepted view that "Yellow Submarine" was merely a McCartney children's song dashed out for Starr, and that it conveys a deeper emotional resonance than was previously apparent.

[13] Author Steve Turner writes that in its focus on childhood themes, "Yellow Submarine" fitted with the contemporaneous psychedelic aesthetic, and that this outlook was reflected in George Harrison's comments to Maureen Cleave in his "How a Beatle Lives" interview, when he spoke of an individual's purity at birth and gradual corruption by society.

[19][20][nb 2] Musicologists Russell Reising and Jim LeBlanc comment that the band's adoption of a coloured submarine as their vessel chimed with Cary Grant captaining a pink one in the 1959 comedy film Operation Petticoat, made during the height of his psychoanalytical experimentation with LSD.

[22] The Beatles' and psychedelia's adoption of childhood themes was also evident in the band's May 1966 single "Paperback Writer", as the falsetto backing vocals chant the title of the French nursery rhyme "Frère Jacques".

As a result, Gould continues, the eponymous submarine "became a satirically updated version of the improbable craft in which Edward Lear put his characters to sea – the Owl and the Pussycat's pea-green boat, the Jumblies' unsinkable sieve".

[27] They also see "Yellow Submarine" as the band introducing travel-related imagery to align with a psychedelic journey conveyed in an LSD trip, a theme used more introspectively in "Tomorrow Never Knows", where Lennon exhorts the listener to "float downstream".

[43] On the third verse, a party atmosphere was evoked through a combination of Jones clinking glasses together and blowing an ocarina,[43] snatches of excited chatter,[49] Boyd's high-pitched shrieks, Bicknell rattling chains,[45] and tumbling coins.

"[45] Gould describes the section as a "Goonish concerto" consisting of sound effects "drawn from the collective unconscious of a generation of schoolboys raised on films about the War Beneath the Seas".

[55] The latter, he says, is "due to their timbre, recalling radio broadcasts not only as a contemporary experience but also as an emblem of the near-distant past", and he also sees the effects as cinematic in their presentation as "a coherent sonic scenario, one that could be diegetic to an imagined series of filmic events".

[43] Keen to sound as if he were singing underwater, Lennon tried recording the part with a microphone encased in a condom and, at Emerick's suggestion, submerged inside a bottle filled with water.

[42] The song originally opened with a 15-second section containing narration by Starr and dialogue by Harrison, McCartney and Lennon, supported by the sound of marching feet (created by blocks of coal being shaken inside a box).

[44][58] Written by Lennon,[58] the narrative focused on people marching from Land's End to John o' Groats, and "from Stepney to Utrecht", and sharing the vision of a yellow submarine.

[72] According to a report in Melody Maker on 30 July, the reason for the Beatles breaking with precedent and releasing a single from Revolver was to thwart sales of cover recordings of "Eleanor Rigby".

[83][84] The "Jesus" controversy overshadowed the release of the single and the album there;[85] public bonfires were held to burn their records and memorabilia,[86][87] and many radio stations refused to play the Beatles' music.

[101] Melody Maker's reviewer said that the song's basic qualities would make it a "nursery rhyme or public house singalong" and complimented Starr's vocal performance and the "fooling around" behind him.

[103] Cash Box found the single's pairing "unique" and described "Yellow Submarine" as "a thumping, happy go lucky, special effects filled, highly improbable tale of joyous going on beneath the sea".

"[105] In their joint review for Record Mirror, Peter Jones said he was not especially impressed by the track but that it demonstrated the band's versatility, while Richard Green wrote: "Sort of Beatle 'Puff the Magic Dragon' ... Will be very big at about 9.30 on a Saturday morning on the Light Programme.

[70] Tim Riley views "Yellow Submarine" as the first original Beatles composition on which Starr was able to project his personality, and he admires Lennon's vocal contribution for its abundance of "Goon humor" and for transforming the track into a "sailor's drinking song".

"[119] Alex Petridis of The Guardian views "Yellow Submarine" as "lovable but slight" and considers it "faintly mind-boggling" that the Beatles chose the song as the lead side of their first single culled from an album over not just "Eleanor Rigby" but also "Taxman" and "Here, There and Everywhere".

[121][nb 14] Sociologist and cultural commentator Todd Gitlin recalled that the song thereby became an anthem uniting the counterculture and New Left activism at Berkeley, citing its adoption by Michael Rossman of the Free Speech Movement,[122] who described it as an expression of "our trust in our future, and of our longing for a place fit for us all to live in".

"[124] At a Mobe protest, also in San Francisco, a yellow papier-mâché submarine made its way through the crowd, which Time magazine interpreted as a "symbol of the psychedelic set's desire for escape".

In the solipsistic pink and white nightmare of 'the special life' ..."[120] Donovan later said that "Yellow Submarine" represented the Beatles' predicament as prisoners of their international fame, to which they reacted by singing an uplifting, communal song.

[125] In November 1966, artist Alan Aldridge created a cartoon illustration of "Yellow Submarine" and three other Revolver tracks to accompany a feature article on the Beatles in Woman's Mirror magazine.

The article, which drew from Maureen Cleave's interviews with the band members from early in the year, was flagged on the cover in a painting by Aldridge that showed the Beatles ensnared by barbed wire under a giant speech balloon reading: "HELP!

"[137][nb 18] The song inspired the 1968 United Artists animated film Yellow Submarine, which was produced by King Features Syndicate, the company behind the popular children's TV series The Beatles.

[141][nb 19] Doggett writes that the song thereby became the most important track on Revolver "in business terms", since it staved off pressure from United Artists for the Beatles to fulfil their contractual obligations for a third feature film.

[153] Music journalist Rob Chapman writes that "Yellow Submarine" inaugurated a trend for nursery rhyme-like songs during the psychedelic era, peaking in late 1967 with UK top-ten singles for Keith West, Traffic and Simon Dupree and the Big Sound.