It's the Great White House Financial Reg Reform Video, Charlie Brown

President Obama signs the Dodd-Frank bill into law at 11:30 a.m. ET.  Ahead of the event Yahoo Finance has received an exclusive sneak preview of an animated video the White House has produced to explain the bill and why regulatory reform matters.

The animation will remind Americans of a certain age of the “School House Rock” classic about how a bill becomes a law, while the background piano music evokes the theme music from “Peanuts.” Americans of a slightly younger age will think of the “Harold and Kumar” movies because the video is narrated by the actor Kal Penn. After more than a year working for the administration, Penn recently resigned from his post as Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement.

If the desultory audience reaction to our reg reform stories is any indication, the White House has good reason for upping the entertainment value of this video. While unlikely to surplant “Despicable Me” as this summer’s blockbuster, the video attempts to boil regulatory reform down to its bare essentials:

•    Wall Street behaved badly, gambling on mortgage-backed securities and putting the entire economy at risk. “As a result, millions went unemployed, small businesses couldn’t get credit; the middle class got squeezed,” Penn explains.

•    The resulting decline in economic activity and home prices put millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure. “To make matters worse, everyone’s 401k probably took a big hit too,” Penn explains. “And to top it all off, the government had to bail out the big bank using your tax dollars because it was, as they say ‘too big to fail.’

•    “Risky behavior” by Wall Street banks “had to be stopped…and that’s just what reform will do,” the video claims, citing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

•    Thanks to the CFPA, “unintelligible mortgages will get a whole lot simpler” and there will be clearer language on credit cards, overdraft fees and student loans.

The video is an obvious simplification of a very complex issue and critics of the bill (and the White House) will certainly have “what for” to say about it, most notably when Penn claims: “For banks there’s no more betting, just banking.” (The reg reform bill does curtail proprietary trading by banks and their ability to invest in hedge funds and other speculative vehicles, but doesn’t eliminate it.)

Furthermore, the video claims “banks will be prevented from growing so large they put the entire economy at risk if they were to fail,” which sorta glosses over the fact the ‘too big to fail’ banks have become even bigger since the crisis of 2008. And the video claims there will be “no more bailouts” for banks that do get themselves in trouble, which remains to be seen.

I wonder what Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and the other architects of the 2008 bailouts would say about that. What about you? What do you think of reg reform and the White House’s attempt to sell it?

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