was recorded at Casbah Recording Studio in Fullerton with recording engineer Chaz Ramirez, and was co-produced by Ramirez and the band members. The band included a cover version of the John Lennon song "Instant Karma!" The album was mastered by Eddie Schreyer at Capitol Studios. Danny Dorrance designed the album cover, using photographs taken by Kim Dorrance: the front cover features a night view of the Balboa Fun Zone with its Ferris wheel and other attractions aglow with decorative lighting, while the back cover incorporates a photograph of the Fun Zone's old-fashioned carousel. Release and reception Balboa Fun*Zone was released in 1988 on Triple X Records in LP, cassette, and compact disc formats, and was given a European release by Roadrunner Records. The CD version includes three additional tracks: "Runaway"; "She Walks Alone"; and "Surf Yogi", an instrumental interpretation of "If I Were a Rich Man" from the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof. Interviewing the Adolescents prior to an October 1988 performance in Huntington Beach, California, Mike Boehm of the Los Angeles Times called the album "excellent" and opined that it found the band "turning into adults, appreciating the deeper perspective that growing up brings, yet still cherishing the vibrancy they knew as young punk rockers." Ten years later, he included it in a list of "Essential Albums, '78–'98" giving an overview of Orange County punk and alternative rock, saying that it "[took] the Adolescents to musical adulthood that marked Soto's emergence as a significant singing and songwriting talent", but also that it was "a noble failure, too advanced for fans who craved the hard-and-fast stuff, and too ahead of its time for the wave that would lift pop-buoyed punk into the mainstream during the 1990s." In a retrospective review, Stewart Mason of AllMusic gave Balboa Fun*Zone 3 stars out of 5 and said that Soto and Rikk Agnew's split songwriting and vocal performances "[give] the album an appealingly varied sound that ranges from the anthemic rocker 'Just Like Before' to the engagingly loose, Johnny Thunders-like 'It's Tattoo Time'. Best of the lot are the two entirely different tunes named after the album title, the smoking hardcore 'Balboa Fun Zone (Riot on the Beach)" and the much poppier, '60s-inspired 'Balboa Fun Zone (It's in Your Touch)'. Worst of the lot is a sloppy, basically pointless cover of John Lennon's 'Instant Karma!' Although there's little that truly stands out besides