Adaptation Displacement: While the film has been overshadowed by its own theme song, the novels have faded into complete obscurity. (Which is actually rather a shame - they're pretty good.)
Shaft in Africa: Vincent Amafi opens the film executing a diplomat's son who got too close to the truth that Amafi is running a modern day slave trade. Amafi offers young men from Africa new lives, only to sell them into labor-intensive jobs for literal pennies where they work 7 days a week for 16 hours per day with no way to speak up lest they face deportation or murder. Using slave labor on his own estates, Amafi has an apartment full of enslaved workers burned down and the workers killed in an attempt to murder the hero John Shaft. It is revealed he is keeping a group of prisoners in his own estate's dungeons, even rigging the cells with explosives to kill them all should Shaft not surrender.
Imitation of Life comic, by David F. Walker, Dietrich Smith, et al.: Lou Peraino, or "Lollipop Lou," is a vile mobster running a pornography operation, happily dealing in the most extreme territories people can think of—even snuff—so long as he's paid. Lou has no issue addicting young men and women to drugs to force them to become "stars" for his films, and when he's tracked down by Shaft, Lou is about to use a Blaxploitation actor gang-raped by a bunch of men dressed in Klansmen suits.
Just Here for Godzilla: The film is one of the best Blaxploitation flicks, and was such a huge hit that it saved its studio MGM from bankruptcy and led to two sequels and a TV series, as well as two modern revivals. But that theme song all by itself is what people remember.
Unintentional Period Piece: The entire 1971 film stands out as very much of its time (the slang, the haircuts, the clothes, the funk soundtrack, the mere concept that Shaft can afford office space in Times Square), but the opening credits are especially notable for Shaft walking through the Gay Activists' Alliance "zap" protest of Fidelifacts, showing that it was shot on January 18 of that year.
