Are Robotic Foot Ninja even a good idea?

[neatoman]

In two of the cartoons, most of the Foot Ninja we saw were actually androids. The real world justification is that the Turtles shouldn't be shown to slice up human beings on a kids' show, which makes some sense, why even use blades if they're only gonna knock out the enemy? But there are some problems with this and the solution is somewhat shortsighted.

First off, it assumes the Foot Ninja are the only things they would be fighting. Quite a lot of the time they are also shown fighting aliens, mutants, demons and other things that could easily have been shown to bleed any color other than red, or not even be made of flesh and blood in the first place. And of course, there are fights against other types of robots, so there isn't much of a need to make the Ninja robots just to cut open the enemy.

The second and perhaps more important problem with the Robotic Foot Ninja is what it does for the world building. The notion of a ninja clan conjures up the idea of some devoted group of people, with loyalty to either a master or a cause, with some sense of tradition and hierarchy. If most or all of the members are robotic and therefore replaceable on the other hand, what does that mean? If it just comes down to some guy with an indefinite army of robots, then why even bother modelling it on ninja?