In an old article on his blog about a youthful passion for the Dragonlance novels, Timothy S Brannan shared the wise saying: "The Golden Age of Sci-Fi/Fantasy is 14."
And this is so true.
The things we discover at that age stay with us.
For me, this would be around 1980... the year Hawk The Slayer came out.
I've written often of my love for this most Dungeons & Dragons of all fantasy movies (and probably will continue to do so).
At the dawn of the '80s, I was already engrossed in the stop-motion worlds of Ray Harryhausen fantasy movies (his last, Clash of The Titans, would come out in 1981), and this was also the era of the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back (which came out in 1980).
I was reading mainly sci-fi (Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, Stainless Steel Rat etc), if I recall correctly (inspired by the galaxy far, far away), but my young gaming hobby had propelled me to the works of Fritz Leiber.
His Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser stories would come to influence my Dungeons & Dragons adventures as much as Harryhausen's Sinbad at that time.
I was always a player - rather than a Dungeon Master - in my early years, so was interested in character ideas, rather than grander plots and world-building (not that I didn't appreciate them at that time, but they just weren't as useful from a gaming perspective).
I had yet to stumble upon the stack of New Teen Titans in a second-hand book store in Tunbridge Wells and become a fully-fledged comic book collector, but I still dabbled in that medium.
2000AD was my publication of choice at that age.
And, of course, all these things still hold sway over me and continue to influence my gaming and broader hobby interests.
I don't think I realised, until just now, quite how important the art we discover at that particular age is in shaping the sort of person we grow into in our adult life and our hobbies, passions, and interests.