When I was a kid I had already caught the more general collecting bug, and I was obsessed mainly with the Suske & Wiske comic books. I collected every one I could find and in several of them they went back to musketeer times:
I was already starting to become a bit obsessed with swords around that time and I really wanted one of those cup hilts. My first one was plastic. Now I have this one:
I still think of this as my Suske & Wiske sword.
Eventually I started a sword-like object collection with a friend of mine around the age of ten that consisted primarily of this kind of thing:
We used to playfight with these and they were pretty blade heavy. It's kind of a wonder we didn't bludgeon each other into the hospital. But that always had me wondering how those swordsmen could move those swords so fast in the movies, and because of that unwieldiness of those fake swords, I'm still very much fascinated by the feel of the weight distribution of various real swords and how big a difference that can make in their handling characteristics (which is why I am always a bit disappointed if a sword blade is loose when I buy it from abroad as it makes it more difficult to wave them around slightly). I was extremely jealous of my friend when one day he came home from vacation in Spain with a toreador sword and one of those Collada del Cid repros (we later did modern fencing together as an outflow of this shared sword fascination but I always found it a bit disappointing in how abstracted it was from the real thing and I was pretty terrible tbh; still, I should try my hand at HEMA some time).
I'll add here a story I told recently on Matt Easton's youtube channel. My uncle had a sword he got in Nigeria (a takouba, I later learned) and I was of course obsessed with it. Here in the Netherlands we celebrate Sinterklaas with presents which have a poem attached and are sometimes wrapped in a kind of arts and crafts project of sorts. One Sinterklaas in 1993, I got one of a paper maché dinosaur and my uncle's sword! The poem told me to slay the dinosaur. Inside were tickets to see Jurassic Park (dinosaurs were another obsession). I got to keep the sword, and I still have it until this day.
It's not sharp and it's not the highest quality takouba out there (and the blade is a bit loose in the hilt) but of course that one will never leave my collection.
It took me another 25+ years to start a real sword collection.