The Soundtrack That Got You Interested In Soundtracks

For me, it's Hans Zimmer's The Da Vinci Code soundtrack. When I first saw the movie and heard the piano in "Rose of Arimathea" and then the ending with "Chevaliers de Sangreal" that almost broke me into tears, made me eager to look for the composer.. and I fell in love with him and his other compositions I started looking for then!
I have to say Andrew Lloyd Webber as well.. these two got me interested in sondtracks :)

It's hard for me to say, which score actually got it started, because I have been rather attentive to the music in movies and TV series from a very early age. I was one of those children who noticed the songs and sang along or hummed the tunes later on. I still remember some of them, even though I haven't heard them since I was 5 years old.

But some very special ones do come to mind.
The first one would be the score by Waldemar Kazanecki for a Polish animated movie called The Adventures of the Blue Knight (Przygody blekitnego rycerzyka). It's a story about a blue fairy, who, when he saves the page of the butterfly queen, is knighted, and begins his journey to save the butterfly queen's sister. It is told in the style of old medieval romances (like for example The Tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). I saw the movie when I was maybe five years old, and luckily my parents taped it on a VHS, because I was practically mesmerized by it, and have since watched it so many times I know it by heart. One of the things that was so special about it were the songs, which were very true to the style of the movie (like for example the ballad the Blue Knight sings to the queen).

The second would be the score for an old SNES game called Secret of Mana (Seikendensetsu 2), the score of which was composed by Hiroki Kikuta (菊田裕樹). It was pure happenstans that I bought the game, it was my second SNES game ever. I was 13 at the time. The score was so beautiful and mythical, from the very first note to the very last, and so emotionally engaging, that there were times I would take the characters to certain places just to hear a particular theme. I was overjoyed when, almost fifteen years later, with a help of a friend, I found the soundtrack from an online CD shop (I think it was Amazon, but I can't remember for sure). The first time I heard the songs after more than ten years I was almost moved to tears (yes, I tend to experience emotions brought on by music very strongly).

The third one (and most likely the crucial one) would be the score for the Return of the Jedi by John Williams. I was maybe ten years old when I first saw it, and it made a very strong impact, once again, partly because the exceptional score. I had seen the two previous movies already, and I had liked them, but the Return of the Jedi was in a league of its own. When the choir began its chant when Luke and Darth Vader began their final duel, and as the chant gained momentum as did the duel, it made shivers run up and down my spine and made me hold my breath - not so much because of the duel itself, but because of the song. Some years later at school I attended a special course for music in the movies, and as a part of it we needed to write a one page analysis of a movie score. My teacher was somewhat dumbfounded, when I returned her the eight or ten pages long deep analysis of the score of the Return of the Jedi, where I had analyzed the score, pointing out themes for places and characters, how they'd intertwine, how they were reprised, how the different instruments were used to affect the tone of the score, and how the score supported and reacted to the scenes. I had dedicated an entire page (maybe running a bit onto a second page) for the duel. (Needless to say, I got the highest possible mark for the paper and for the course because of the analysis... XD ).
Anyway, this project was probably the decisive moment, after which I was so aware of the scores, it became impossible ever to ignore them again.

One final thing that further strengthened my relationship with scores was the time I spent during my late teens (from age 16 to 20) as an actress in an amateur theatre and got very involved in scoring some of the plays (in other words, choosing songs to play during various scenes) and choreographing some of the dramatic dances (ie. scenes that use dance and/or dancelike movements as part of the scene). Taking part in the process of actually building the audile atmosphere of a play gave me further insight on how the symbiosis of "the scene affecting the song affecting the scene" actually works. It even made me consider a possible career as a music director/editor, an idea I still occasionally toy with.

My, this became a very long answer... ^^;