How can I boot images on external hard drives with an older OS

Hi,
I recently bought a new MacBook Pro Retina (running OS 10.9.2 Mavericks), because I had to give back my „old“ one (bought in February 2013, running OS 10.8 Mountain Lion), which was only a loan from University.
So here comes my problem: I used Carbon Copy Cloner to create bootable images of my old MacBook on two independent hard drives. I tested these images and they both booted perfectly well on the old MacBook. As it turns out, I cannot boot from these images on my new MacBook Pro, I just get a crossed grey circle (both images work perfectly well when I boot from my internal hard drive and I just use them as external drive, by the way). Is it really correct, that it is not possible to boot a system with an older OS as the OS of the MacBook? Why? I really would like to have the option of booting these images, since I have some applications installed I might want to use from time to time in the future (and I don’t want to migrate all applications to my new MacBook, but prefer a clean install). As I understand, it would be necessary to update the images to Mavericks. But how do I do this when I have no computer which is able to boot them?
I still have a very old MacBook from 2007 running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and I also tried booting the images with this computer - didn’t work either. Would it help to update this to Snow Leopard? What OS would I need to boot my Mountain Lion images?
Any help on this is highly appreciated!
Thanks!

Hi!
Thanks for your prompt response. The reason I don't want to migrate all apps is that I had installed a lot of scientific applications on the Mt-Lion MacBook that I will definitely not use in the future, some that I might use only very rarely, and I can migrate only the complete applications folder (and I have only a 256 GB hard drive). Of course I could deinstall the unused apps manually after the migration, but I am not 100% sure, if this procedure completely removes all the stuff from the libraries and preferences, etc. Moreover I also started playing with some time ago with server applications like apache server etc. and since I am a complete newbie in this field, I have to admit, I really don't know how to uninstall these things properly. So I figured a clean install for the new MacBook would be the best. Well, maybe I will migrate everything and remove the unnecessary stuff afterwards manually. I am just a bit disappointed, because I didn't anticipate these problems with the images...
Just one further question: Is it correct, that if I find a way to update my images from Mt-Lion to Mavericks (if that is possible at all?), this would make them bootable again?
Thanks!

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